Sam Shepard is one of those natural dramatists who is almost obsessed with dramatic form. In "Melodrama Play" …, Mr. Shepard is as much concerned with being melodramatic as with being playful.

He is trying to take the essence of the old melodrama—its exaggerated expression of understandable feeling and its use of music for accentuation and extension—and to give it a new life. The attempt has often been tried before, but always at the expense of the melodrama. In such contemporary updatings the form was presented—slightly off-key—in a manner meant to be laughed at. Mr. Shepard, on the other hand, is doing the far more difficult feat of exploring the form's present validity….

Mr. Shepard is a playwright who gives the comforting impression of always knowing what he is doing. You may not especially like it, and this work started to bore me as soon...