SAM SHEPARD   (1943 - )


Sam Shepard
   Nationality:
USA
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Plays by Sam Shepard

SAM SHEPARD
4-H Club
1st Produced:
New York
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
three young men in a trash filled apartment, with occasional outbreaks of violence and shouting
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SAM SHEPARD
Action
1st Produced:
New York
1975
Company:
-
1st Published:
Faber & Faber, London, 1975
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Four Short Plays
One Act
Parts:
Male
2
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
two shaven headed couples sit around a wooden table and wait for and finally consume a real roasted turkey, motiveless and puposefuless like a chimpanzee's tea party
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SAM SHEPARD
Angel City
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1976
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York, 1976
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
Play with Music
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
music by Bob Feldman
Synopsis:
Los Angeles and a young magician and fixer is summoned to work a 'slight miracle' on a disaster movie
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SAM SHEPARD
Back Bog Beast Bait
1st Produced:
New York
1971
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
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Genre:
with music
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
3
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
two cowboys are hired by woman to fight a monster ravaging the Louisiana countryside
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SAM SHEPARD
Blue Bitch
1st Produced:
New York
1973
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
Short Play
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
televised 1972
Synopsis:
phone rings as someone in Scotland wants to buy to American expatriates greyhound, milkman solves all the problems as a singing telegram arrives
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SAM SHEPARD
Buried Child
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1978
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Buried Child and Other Plays", Faber, London, 1980
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
Tragedy
Parts:
Male
5
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbors a dark secretyears earlier the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy and suggests the perhaps slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin.
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SAM SHEPARD
Chicago
1st Produced:
New York
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
3
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
a comedy about a young man in a bathtub
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SAM SHEPARD
Cowboy Mouth
1st Produced:
Edinburgh
1971
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York, 1971
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
2
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written with Patti Smith
Synopsis:
games as woman with taste for French poetry wants to turn Slim into a rock and roll star
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SAM SHEPARD
Cowboys
1st Produced:
New York
1964
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
two young men in an unidentified space act out their various fantasies until finally turning on the audience
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SAM SHEPARD
Cowboys #2
1st Produced:
New York
1967
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York, 1971
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
two young men sit and talk about whether it is likely to rain
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SAM SHEPARD
Curse of the Starving Class
1st Produced:
London
1977
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York, 1976
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
7
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
The setting is a farmhouse somewhere in the American West, inhabited by a family who have enough to eat, but not enough more to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father is a drunk; the mother a frowzy slattern; the daughter precocious beyond her years; and the son a deranged idealist who wants something better but has no clear idea of how to attain it. The action is filled with changes and counter-changes as the family decides to sell the house to raise money; the mother talks of running off to Europe or Mexico, but ends up asleep on the kitchen table; the father sobers up and tries to take control; the daughter is blown up in the family car; and the son is brutalized and bloodied by the evil forces besetting them. In the end of the play its people become a metaphor for the underside of American lifethe benighted innocents forever pursuing a diminished dream, and the illusion of fulfillment which remains ever beyond their reach.
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SAM SHEPARD
Dog
1st Produced:
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
about a black guy on a park bench
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SAM SHEPARD
Eyes For Consuela
1st Produced:
-
-
Company:
-
1st Published:
Dramatists Play Service, NY,
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
3
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
Based on The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz.
Synopsis:
A disheveled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored, a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded "hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay put for his own safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the underbrush he is set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory figure bears a machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut the eyes from Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in order to present this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of blue eyes" to the bewitching Consuela. The fervor of Amado's obsessed mission, his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight, push Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humor, cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite him with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela appears before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road out of the tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible.
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SAM SHEPARD
Far North
1st Produced:
-
-
Company:
-
1st Published:
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Film Script
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
2
Female
5
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
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SAM SHEPARD
Fool For Love
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1983
Company:
-
1st Published:
City Lights, San Francisco, 1983
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Comedy Drama
Comedy
Parts:
Male
3
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
The scene is a stark motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert. May, a disheveled young woman, sits dejectedly on a rumpled bed while Eddie, a rough-spoken rodeo performer, crouches in a corner fiddling with his riding gear. When he attempts to console May, who is distressed by Eddie's frequent absences and love affairs, she seems, at first, to softenbut then she suddenly attacks him. As the recriminations pour out, and the action becomes, at times, physically violent, the desperate nature of their relationship becomes apparentthey cannot get along with, or without, one another, yet neither can subdue their burning passion. The poignancy of their situation (they are half-brother and half-sister as well as lovers) is pointed out by the play's two other characters: a hapless young man who stops by to take May to the movies and becomes the butt of Eddie's funniest yet most humiliating jokes; and a ghostly old man (perhaps their father) who sits in a rocking chair at the side of the stage, sipping whiskey and commenting wryly on what he observes. Eventually May and Eddie tire of their struggle and embracebut it is evident that the respite is temporary and that their love, the curse of the past which haunts them, will remain forever damned and hopeless.
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SAM SHEPARD
Forensic and the Navigators
1st Produced:
New York
1967
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
confused struggle between two revolutionaries and the Fxterminators, who are agents for an unnamed power holding people in a nearby prison camp
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SAM SHEPARD
Fourteen Hundred Thousand
1st Produced:
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
National Education Television filmed THREE PLAYS FROM LA MAMA. They were PAVANE by Jean Claude Van Itallie, FOURTEEN HUNDRED THOUSAND by Sam Shepard, and THE RECLUSE by Paul Foster. Tom O'Horgan directed the entire program.
Synopsis:
two people are building a bookcase for her fourteen hundred thousand books, assisted and watched by three others
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SAM SHEPARD
Geography of a Horse Dreamer
1st Produced:
London
1974
Company:
-
1st Published:
Grove Press, New York, 1974
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Mystery Play
Mystery
Parts:
Male
8
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
though rescued by his brothers a Wyoming cowboy, pure at heart but destroyed in spirit, cannot recapture the world he has lost
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SAM SHEPARD
God Of Hell, The
1st Produced:
Actors Studio Drama School Theater, NYC
2004
Company:
-
1st Published:
Dramatist Play Service, NY

Methuen Drama, London >>> ,
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
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Genre:
Dark Comedy, 70 min
Comedy
Parts:
Male
3
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
An uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma. Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Franks old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, theyre visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously low half life.
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SAM SHEPARD
Hawk Moon
1st Produced:
London
1989
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
-
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
Top of Page
SAM SHEPARD
Holy Ghostly, The
1st Produced:
1969
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
in an effort to catch the ghostly Chindi Ice comes to New York to camp out with his father whom he shoots after endless arguments
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SAM SHEPARD
Icarus's Mother
1st Produced:
New York
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
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Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
five young people after finishing a 4th July barbecue watch a plane flying overhead and eventually crash
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SAM SHEPARD
Inacoma
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1977
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
Play with Music
Parts:
Male
2
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
based on Karen Ann Quinian case
Synopsis:
woman in a coma and its effects on those around her
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SAM SHEPARD
Jacaranda
1st Produced:
New York
1979
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
text for dance
Dance Play
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
dance by Daniel Nagrin
Synopsis:
a man wakes up in his lover's 'rather extravagant' bed. She's not there
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SAM SHEPARD
Jackson's Dance
1st Produced:
New Haven, Connecticut
1980
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
-
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written with Jaques Levy
Synopsis:
Top of Page
SAM SHEPARD
Kicking A Dead Horse
1st Produced:
2007
Company:
-
1st Published:
Faber & Faber, London, 2008
ISBN
-
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Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
1
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
New York art dealer Hobart Struther goes on a desert walkabout to rediscover his "authenticity" and is stranded when his horse dies. And there it is, in the middle of the stage: a life-sized dead horse. As Hobart repeatedly tries and fails to tip it into a too-small grave while telling his story, one is reminded of Beckett's love for Buster Keaton: Rea brilliantly mixes antic behaviour and deadpan delivery with this Sisyphean shtick. However, the key writer Shepard is glossing is himself. Hobart made his fortune reselling paintings of the American west at a massive markup. "What I couldn't see was how those old masterpieces would become like demons, trapping me in a life I wasn't meant for," he says. This and other references make it clear that Shepard is nodding to his own career, seeming to want to renounce his past creative patterns by sending them up. But by invoking all his familiar themes - the west, dreams of escape, tourism, violence, authenticity - Shepard re-inscribes them even as he claims to disavow them.
- Karen Fricker, Guardian
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SAM SHEPARD
Killer's Head
1st Produced:
New York
1975
Company:
-
1st Published:
Faber & Faber, London, 1975
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
Monologue
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
thoughts on nurturing a racehorse made horrifying by the fact that it represents the last thoughts of a young man about to be electrocuted
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SAM SHEPARD
Late Henry Moss, The
1st Produced:
2000
Company:
-
1st Published:
ISBN
-
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Genre:
full length
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
7
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
1st published Dramatist Play Service, NY
Synopsis:
Two antagonistic brothers, Ray and Earl, are brought together after their father, Henry Moss, is found dead in his seedy New Mexico home. Henry was a harassing, arrogant drunk, and his sons have inherited his worst qualities. Ray is determined to uncover the mysterious circumstances of Henry's death. In three acts, the story of the father's last days unfolds in flashbacks
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SAM SHEPARD
Lie of the Mind, A
1st Produced:
Promenade Theatre, New York
1985
Company:
-
1st Published:
New American Library, New York

Methuen Drama, London >>> , 1987
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Love Ballad
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
4
Female
4
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
Involves two desparate families connected by the marriage of the son of one (Jake) to the daughter of the other (Beth). As the play begins Beth, brain-damaged from a savage beating that Jake has given her, is being tended by her parents, Baylor and Meg. Jake sends his brother, Frankie, to Montana to see if she is dead or alive, but Beth's father, mistaking Frankie for a poacher, shoots him in the leg and takes him prisoner. Thereafter the tensions and enmities that motivate the two families grow increasingly disturbing and dangerous. Frankie falls in love with Beth, but her brother, Mike, is bitterly determined that she no longer have anything to do with her husband or his loathsome family. Meanwhile the distraught, hysterical Jake, back home in California, is nursed by his possessive mother, Lorraine, and his sister, Sally, to whom Lorraine is openly hostile. Having gotten Jake back from Beth, Lorraine is determined to keep him with her forever, but Jake soon recovers and sets out to regain his wife. In the end, however, his will fails, and he allows Beth to stay with Frankie; Lorraine burns down her house and departs for Ireland with Sally; and Jake, bereft and alone, seeks communication with his dead father by gently dispersing his ashes into the moonlighthoping to find order and meaning in the present by coming to terms with the haunting spectres of the past.
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SAM SHEPARD
Little Ocean
1st Produced:
London
1974
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
no further publications or performances
Synopsis:
three girls - one who has had a child, one who is pregnant, and one who never has been - look at pregnancy from a women's point of view
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SAM SHEPARD
Mad Dog Blues
1st Produced:
New York
1971
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York, 1971
ISBN
-
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Genre:
two act adventure show with music
One Act
Parts:
Male
6
Female
3
Parts Other:
musicians
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
images of Marlene Dietrich and Mae west as country boy and city slicker set off for an adventure
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SAM SHEPARD
Melodrama Play
1st Produced:
1967
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
ISBN
-
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Genre:
melodrama with music
One Act
Parts:
Male
5
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written by Leonard Melfi and Sam Shepard
Synopsis:
manager harasses singer song writer and his brother to try to force a follow up to their one big song
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SAM SHEPARD
Nightwalk
1st Produced:
New York
1973
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Open Theater", Drama Book specialists, New York, 1975
ISBN
-
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Genre:
Collaboration
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
2
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written with Megan Terry and Jean-Claude van Itallie
Synopsis:
God is indicted for his absence and the consequent sense of absurdity is compounded by the materialism and sexual role playing of society
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SAM SHEPARD
Oh! Calcutta!
1st Produced:
Eden Theatre, Off Broadway, NY
1969
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
Musical
Parts:
Male
8
Female
5
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
Conceived by Kenneth Tynan; Contributions by Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Jacques Levy, Leonard Melfi, David Newman, Robert Benton, Sam Shepard, Clovis Trouille, Kenneth Tynan and Sherman Yellen; Music and Lyrics, The Open Window: Robert Dennis, Peter Schickele and Stanley Walden; Musical Director: Norman Bergen
Synopsis:
Oh! Calcutta! was a long-running avant-garde theatrical revue, created by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. The show, consisting of various sketches on sex-related topics, debuted in Off-Broadway in 1969. It proved, once again, that sex sells, running in London for over 2,400 performances, and in New York for over 1,600. The show sparked considerable controversy at the time, because it featured extended scenes of total nudity, both male and female. The title is taken from a painting by Clovis Trouille, itself a pun on "O quel cul t'as!", French for "What an ass you have!". Tynan had hoped that Harold Pinter would direct the production, in order to give it avant-garde legitimacy, but Pinter declined. (The original director was Jacques Levy, remembered by most now as the songwriting partner of Bob Dylan on his album Desire.) Most of the sketches (written, amongst others, by Nobel prize winner Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, Sam Shepard, Edna O'Brien, Jules Feiffer, and Tynan himself) featured the cast naked (including Bill Macy). Peter Schickele (aka 'PDQ Bach'), Robert Dennis and Stanley Walden were the revue's composers, known as The Open Window. A pay-per-view video production played on closed-circuit TV in select cities in 1971, and in 1972 a motion picture version was also released - in both cases many cities and municipalities banned its showing. A 1976 Broadway revival at the Edison Theatre ran for thirteen years, briefly becoming the longest-running play in Broadway history, with a total of 5,959 performances.
- Wikipedia
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SAM SHEPARD
Operation Sidewinder
1st Produced:
New York
1970
Company:
-
1st Published:
May "Fsquire", New York, 1969
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
-
Play with Music
Parts:
Male
17
Female
4
Parts Other:
many extras
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
an advanced computer escapes into the desert where it becomes the heart of a battle between the power crazy military and a group of black revolutionaries
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SAM SHEPARD
Pure Accident
1st Produced:
-
2004
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One act
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
-
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SAM SHEPARD
Red Cross
1st Produced:
New York
1966
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1967
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
1
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
hypochondria and real bugs in a Red cross Cabin
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SAM SHEPARD
Rock Garden, The
1st Produced:
New York
1964
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
1
Female
1
Parts Other:
1g 1b
Notes:
final scene in Oh! Calcutta (New York, 1969)
Synopsis:
play about son leaving his parents; autobiographical
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SAM SHEPARD
Rocking Chair
1st Produced:
New York
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
Ghosts are hellzapoppin in Lee Blessing's self-described new "metaphysical farce," FORTINBRAS, a comic interplay of wry literary criticism and contemporary wit which takes up where William Shakespeare's Hamlet left off. As inescapably relevant to today's political scene as the classic from which it is drawn, FORTINBRAS cannot help but raise questions about authority and leadership, yet with its mocking (and loving) reverence for Shakespeare's vision, Blessing's play comes closer in tone to Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead-sexy, inquisitive, and ultimately satisfying to the revisionist theater-lover. Chosen by Time magazine as one of the year's ten best plays for 1991, calling it "Lee Blessing's splendid musing on the most influential play in the English language. . ." "This comedy serves up a yuppie, postmodern Fortinbras, a bewildered Horatio, a blossoming Osric and lots of tasty ghosts." -LA Times. ". . .only Blessing would possess the nerve and the talent to undertake such a task. . .Where we suffered and
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SAM SHEPARD
Sad Lament of Pecos Bill On the Fve Of Killing His Wife, The
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1976
Company:
-
1st Published:
City Lights, San Francisco, 1983
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
operetta
One Act
Parts:
Male
1
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
the first cowboy and his wife whom he killed by allowing her to ride his horse which throws her
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SAM SHEPARD
Savage/Love
1st Produced:
New York
1979
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Seven Plays", Bantam, New York, 1981
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
piece with music
Piece
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written with Joseph Chaikin
Synopsis:
beguiling mix of jazz, mime and speech investigating the life and death of the French cultural icon, Boris Vian. Vian was an archetypal Left Bank Bohemian who combined the roles of dramatist, novelist, jazz-trumpeter and wit: I have a mental picture of a Parisian George Melly. But the most extraordinary fact about Vian's life was the manner of his leaving it: he died, at 39, while watching a cinematic botchup of one of his novels, I Spit On Your Graves. Seizing avidly on this, Paul Hunter, who has conceived and directed the show, intercuts Vian's fractured memories of his packed life with an imaginative recreation of the grisly movie that propelled his death. The Guardian
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SAM SHEPARD
Seduced
1st Produced:
Providence, Rhode Island
1978
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Buried Child and Other Plays", Faber, London, 1980
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
2
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
Henry Hackamore, reputed to be the richest man in the world, is now a bearded, aged recluse, who lives on the top floor of a Caribbean luxury hotel, attended by his bodyguard-nurse, Raul. Paranoid, desperately lonely and obsessed by a fear of germs, he is kept alive by drugs and infusions of blood from other geniuses. Aware that his life is ebbing away, and determined to have one last fling, he flies in two women whom he had known, and loved, in the past. But while they are still attractive and vigorous, his energies are so drained that they can only talk of other times and other places. Entrapped by his delusions, Hackamore is a burnt-out case, a parody of the American Dream who, despite his limitless wealth and power, cannot forestall the inevitable decline into futility, boredom and an agonizingly lonely death.
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SAM SHEPARD
Shaved Splits
1st Produced:
1970
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
4
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
sketch about two old, old people sitting on a porch in a pair of rocking chairs and talking. Just talking-and of course they don't know how funny they are. Each has had one or more previous marriages and perhaps a few flings, but they are hazy as to details. In fact, they don't always know which one the other one is.
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SAM SHEPARD
Shepardsets
1st Produced:
1984
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
-
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
Composer: Max Roach
Synopsis:
-
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SAM SHEPARD
Silent Tongue
1st Produced:
-
-
Company:
-
1st Published:
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
Film Script
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
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SAM SHEPARD
Simpatico
1st Produced:
2004
Company:
-
1st Published:
Vintage Books, NY, 1995

Methuen Drama, London >>> ,
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
3
Female
3
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
NahatDennis
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SAM SHEPARD
States of Shock
1st Produced:
New York
1991
Company:
-
1st Published:
Dramatists Play Service, NY, 1992

Methuen Drama, London >>> ,
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
Vaudeville Nightmare
Piece
Parts:
Male
3
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
The evening begins with a bang. The deceptive calm of a family restaurant, filled with two disgruntled customers and an inept waitress, is disrupted by offstage sounds of war and destruction. The real disruption begins with the entrance of the Colonel, a middle-aged brute of a man wearing the medals and uniform of a commander, who wheels on Stubbs, a mute paraplegic veteran who served with the Colonel's son. According to the Colonel, they have come "to toast the death of my son and have a nice dessert." While the customers, named only White Man and White Woman, and the waitress, Glory Bee, watch, the Colonel dominates and tyrannizes the stage. Stubbs slowly regains the power of speech and memory, and the tables turn when he reveals his enormous battle scar and hints that he is the Colonel's son. In increasingly bizarre and violent scenes, including a whipping and a food fight, STATES OF SHOCK reaches its shattering conclusion.
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SAM SHEPARD
Suicide in B Flat
1st Produced:
New Haven, Connecticut
1976
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Buried Child and Other Plays", Faber, London, 1980
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
with music
One Act
Parts:
Male
5
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
improvisation within the genre of pulp fiction as two detectives try to solve mystery of the corpse
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SAM SHEPARD
Superstitions
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1981
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
Theatre piece
Piece
Parts:
Male
-
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
under pseudoname Walker Hayes with O-Lan Shepard, music by Catherine Stone
Synopsis:
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SAM SHEPARD
Tongues
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1978
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "Seven Plays", Bantam, New York, 1981
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
piece for voice and precussion
Piece
Parts:
Male
2
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written with Joseph Chaikin
Synopsis:
on his deathbed a man hears voices and sees visions from his past and from his future
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SAM SHEPARD
Tooth of Crime, The
1st Produced:
London
1972
Company:
-
1st Published:
Grove Press, New York, 1974
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
Play with Music
Parts:
Male
7
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
an ageing punk rocker goes against the advice of his courtiers, fights a duel with a usurper and loses, killing himself to preserve his honour
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SAM SHEPARD
True West
1st Produced:
San Francisco
1980
Company:
-
1st Published:
Faber & Faber, London, 1981
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
Comedy
Parts:
Male
3
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
Sibling rivalry as roles reverse; exciting and sometimes wildly funny.
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SAM SHEPARD
Turista, La
1st Produced:
New York
1967
Company:
-
1st Published:
Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
4
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
couple in Mexican hotel room suffering from sunburn when man dies of dysentery, second act has same elements set in America where son jumps through wall
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SAM SHEPARD
Unseen Hand, The
1st Produced:
1969
Company:
-
1st Published:
in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis, 1971
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
5
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
Composer: Beeson Carroll
Synopsis:
common poems of real and imagined moments in the spell of love, Shepard
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SAM SHEPARD
Up To Thursday
1st Produced:
New York
1965
Company:
-
1st Published:
-
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
-
One Act
Parts:
Male
3
Female
2
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
-
Synopsis:
There's more to life than winning trophies - an examination of lust and love.
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SAM SHEPARD
War In Heaven, The
1st Produced:
London
1987
Company:
-
1st Published:
New American Library, New York, 1986
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
Monogue for radio
Play/Drama
Parts:
Male
1
Female
-
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
broadcast 1985 written with Joe Chaikin
Synopsis:
a piece about an angel trapped between two dimensions
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SAM SHEPARD
When The World Was Green
1st Produced:
The Big Little Theatre, NY
2006
Company:
The Michael Chekhov Theatre Co. & Michael Horn
1st Published:
Dramatists Play Service, NY,
ISBN
-
To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Genre:
Drama, full length
-
Parts:
Male
1
Female
1
Parts Other:
-
Notes:
written by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard
Synopsis:
A hauntingly lyrical memory play, WHEN THE WORLD WAS GREEN is steeped in the elliptical, poetic style for which Shepard is justly celebrated. Sketched out in just a handful of scenes is a world of sensual delight, of great journeys to distant lands, and exotic food piled as high as a mountain, glistening in the sun. But as always, the beauty of Shepards landscape is only skin-deep. Under the surface lies a family vendetta that has lasted for seven generations. The play has only two characters, an old man who was once a superb chef and a young reporter who comes to interview him in the prison where he as been locked up for many years after poisoning a man he mistook for his cousin. Their eight conversations are interspersed with a sequence of monologues in which both characters recall incidents from their childhood. These link together to form a tender narrative of regret and loss through which they transcend their memories and reach mutual forgiveness and love.
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