That this rancher poet who emerged out of the off-off-Broadway theater scene of the 1960s (one of his early experimental plays was Cowboy Mouth, written with then-girlfriend Patti Smith) should also have become a reluctant movie star was perhaps the ultimate irony of Shepard’s long and prolific career. The seamless blend of physical and psychological terrain, as well as the contradictory expansiveness and bleakness of the American landscape, are classic Shepard. Harry Dean Stanton, in a key career role, played an amnesiac drifting in from the desert to reconnect with his brother and his seven-year-old son, eventually embarking on a journey with the boy to find his missing mother. The seeds of that focus could be traced to Shepard’s personal history, to his conflicted relationship with his father, a former bomber pilot who became a chronic drinker.Įchoes of that overarching theme run through his finest work as a screenwriter, too, on Wim Wenders‘ 1984 road movie, Paris, Texas, which Shepard co-wrote with L.M. In Shepard’s work, rootless sons are fated to become the fathers they hate siblings are divided, often indistinguishably, into good and irredeemable selves women feed on their victimhood while clinging to the false salvation of their marriages and helpless, hopeless old men refuse to die. No American playwright since Eugene O’Neill had so mercilessly stripped away the consoling notions of familial and romantic love and security to reveal the festering resentments beneath those false comforts. Last seen in New York in a searing 2010 production directed by Ethan Hawke, that 1985 drama about two irrevocably damaged Montana families was the culmination of a defining thematic exploration and arguably its most powerful expression. Shepard’s most lacerating portrait of the breakdown in family values, and, in particular, the illusory authority of the traditional patriarch, was perhaps his 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner Buried Child, which was recently revived in New York and London with Ed Harris and Amy Madigan.īut family, and the irreconcilable frictions and abuses, the disloyalties and rivalries that feed its dysfunction, was a core theme in many of his best-known works of the 1970s and ‘ 80s, among them Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love and the under-appreciated, messy masterpiece A Lie of the Mind.

MIND by David Lloyd Shepard