Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance: That is, he always delivers; he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy. Occasionally the performance is merely dexterous, done with soundness but not with the deepest feelings. Even then, the performance is always satisfying; rarely is there a slipup. Shepared is reliable, a professional secure in the authority of his techniques…. Shepard has the real playwright's gift of habitually transposing his feelings and visions into drama as a mere matter of praxis. He speaks through the theatre as naturally as most of us speak through the telephone….

As the title indicates, [Angel City] is about Los Angeles, and it is Shepard's loony transposition of the young-writer-meets-dream-factory story that so many plays, books, and films about Hollywood...