Modern Drama

States of War in Sam Shepard's States of Shock SUSANNE WILLADT After a six-year silence, Sam Shepard, formerly one of the most prolific and most produced American playwrights, finally returned to the American theater with States of Shock. The play was fust presented by The American Place Theatre in New York City on April 30, '99', for a very limited run.' As has been the case for so many other Shepard plays before, States of Shock was eagerly anticipated by New York theater critics as an opportunity to fight another critical war about Shepard. Shepard has always had what Walter Kerr, the "high priest" of the New York theater critics, once named his "cult audience." However, the surprising fact is that the Shepard cult is split in two: he is either loved or hated, and both with equal passion.' (Kerr, needless to say, hates him!) Consequently, much Shepard criticism can hardly be called objective. It seems that Shepard, who once said that he is not interested in an intellectual but only in an emotional response to his plays, has reached his goal, at least in view of the emotionally charged reactions of the critics. With States of Shock, Shepard's supporters, i.e., Frank Rich, Jack Kroll, and Michael Feingold, at first reacted with relief to the simple fact that he had at least written a new play. Above all, they saw the playas proof that Shepard's productive phase, against all speCUlations, has not yet come to an end, much to the regret of Shepard's harshest critics. John Simon, for example, who renamed the play "States of Schlock," finds it wholly pointless "except for adding to the Shepard myth"; Mimi Kramer, still "in search of the good Shepard," finds the play is simply "an index of the bankruptcy" of Shepard's theatrical vocabulary.3 Even Shepard's defenders, though, have to admit that something was not quite right with the play, that in the end, in keeping with the war imagery in it, "it blows itself up," "like a defective grenade" (Kroll). Never before was the general critical response to a new Shepard playas Mode,." Drama, 36 (1993) 147 SUSANNE WILLADT negative as in the case of States of Shock. Shepard is conscious of this fact. He tries to explain it away as the result of frustrated expectations. since Slates of Shock is, according to Shepard, "so radically different from A Lie of the Mind," and of the difficulty that most critics have in categorizing the play: "They couldn't find a place to put it. They couldn't put it ... Some of them called it absurdism or ... They couldn't fit it into anything" (Rosen, 34). However, States ofShock does make one wonder if Shepard's once extraordinary theatrical talent has not actually imploded. By looking closely at the structure of the play, the states ofwar dramatized, and Shepard's intentions, the following analysis will try to show that Shepard has finally become a victim of his most prominent personal and artistic obsession: his fascination with machismo and with the "mystery" he finds solely in relationships between men' II Shepard once said that he was not interested in the "American social scene at all"5 and that he doesn't have "any political theories.,,6 States of Shock, which was first staged right after the end of the Gulf War, is his first overtly political play, a play "on war and machismo," in Frank Rich's words. Shepard does not consider it "unfair" to read a political or social meaning into his plays but finds it "an incomplete, a partial way of looking at the play" if it is reduced to only one of these meanings (Lippman, 9). He wants to reach what he once called a "much wider dimension,"7 one that goes beyond a mere political or social meaning and reaches "emotional territory" (an expression he just recently used in an interview with Carol Rosen, [34]). Some of Shepard's early plays, i.e., Icarus's Mother (1965), Forensic and the Navigators (1967), The Unseen Hand (1970), or Action (1975),8 as well as his later plays dealing with the disintegration of the...