SOURCE: Wyatt, David. “Shepard's Split.” South Atlantic Quarterly 91, no. 2 (spring 1992): 333-60.

In the following essay, Wyatt explores the ambivalence of the characters and the world view in Shepard's body of work.

Sam Shepard does not write dramas of recognition. His characters renounce insight and resist growth; they seem, instead, the scene for their author's projection of violent, contradictory, inchoate emotions. Shepard's language remains acutely aware of this, but it is an awareness in which the characters scarcely participate. Few of the characters believe in any existence apart from a role, and one purpose of the plays is to explore this. Yet it also seems a limit by which the characters are bound, a repetitive irony through which the playwright asserts his superiority over his players. The conception of life is essentially dramatic, as Richard Gilman argued about Shepard in 1981:

[W]e either take our places in a drama...