
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Surely it would be blasphemy to suggest that the strongest suit in Sam Shepard’s fecund, polymath deck is his prose. His plays have won him the Pulitzer (“Buried Child”). His acting has garnered an Oscar nomination (The Right Stuff). His direction on stage and screen is highly respected, or better. But it is the stories—seemingly attended to by readers only faintly, as a side project or stepchild—where we find the purest expression of the great writer’s mythos, yearnings and toil.
His latest entry into this canon, “Day Out of Days,” continues the turbulent cross-country scribbling pattern of flight described by a Shepard-ish (male, actor, 60s) character as he flees to and from his lover, pursues and recoils from his childhood home, attacks and then retreats from the many tent-poles of American manhood—freedom, risk, independence, adventure, success and fatherhood. Composed of a series of jottings, poems, incantations and meditations, some no longer than a few lines, the book feels like a magical mixtape of little hymns dreamt by the recurring hero of Shepard’s oeuvre including “Great Dream of Heaven,” “Cruising Paradise,” and “Motel Chronicles.” When he was interviewed during the production of his play, “The Late Henry Moss,” for the movie This So-Called Disaster, Shepard was asked what career path, other than his own, he would rather have chosen, he answered immediately, without a moment’s pause, “Musician.” So perhaps it is natural that the drummer and guitarist who has said he conceives of his plays the way a musician does a song, would have found such an arrangement of ballads.






