SOURCE: Shepard, Sam, and Carol Rosen. “Emotional Territory: An Interview with Sam Shepard.” Modern Drama 36, no. 1 (March 1993): 1-11.

In the following interview—which is excerpted from Rosen's book Sam Shepard: A Poetic Rodeo—Shepard discusses his theatrical style and stage imagery as well as his concepts of rhythm, myth, voice, and character.

Sam Shepard is, of course, a conundrum. He is undoubtedly one of the most intuitive practitioners of what Cocteau called “poetry of the theatre,” creating a personal, concrete, physical language of the stage to be apprehended sensually. This encoder of American signs onstage is also an actor's playwright, among the most subtle and sympathetic chroniclers of characters' emotional states since O'Neill. Yet although he occasionally still produces a new play, most recently States of Shock in 1991, Sam Shepard now works primarily in prose and films. He has just completed filming Silent Tongue, a “truly different Western...