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Influencé par le monde artistique et théâtral qui se transformait autour de lui pendant les années soixante et soixante-dix, Shepard va expérimenter lors de sa résidence d’écriture au Magic Theatre, une nouvelle manière d’écrire le théâtre pour ses spectateurs, à travers la confrontation entre texte et scène, personnages et acteurs, action dramatique et performance.Comment lire alors les pièces de cette période? Notre thèse propose d’examiner comment l’acteur, le son, la performance et l’expérience sensorielle du spectateur, sont inscrits dans les textes de notre corpus. Notre travail vise à montrer, à travers la prépondérance intentionnelle de ces éléments dans le texte, comment le texte de Shepard ne s’adresse pas à un simple lecteur mais à un lecteur/spectateur. En effet, contrairement aux autres textes littéraires, le texte de théâtre trouve son actualisation sur scène. Le spectateur est donc celui qui construit le sens in fine de la pièce de théâtre. Notre thèse examine en quoi les pièces de Shepard doivent, pour être comprises, être en partie élucidées par la scène. Notre travail a comme objectif donc d’identifier des éléments scéniques inscrits dans le texte de théâtre et de proposer des outils opérationnels pour les décrire. Il s’agit d’élaborer les prémisses d’une théorie du spectateur implicite pour l’oeuvre de Shepard, dans le but de pouvoir étudier plus rigoureusement le programme de réception inscrit dans son oeuvre. / Influenced by the evolution of the artistic and theatrical context during the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies, Shepard began to experiment at the Magic Theatre with an innovative approach to writing theater for his audience. His approach was to confront the text and the stage, the characters and the actors, dramatic action and performance.How should one read Shepard’s plays from this period? Our study suggests that the actor, sound, performance and the sensory experience of the spectator are written within the texts of our corpus. Through our observation of the predominance of these elements in the texts themselves, our thesis demonstrates how Shepard’s text does not simply address the reader but reaches out to the reader/ spectator. The theatrical text, unlike other literary texts, reveals its essence on stage. In a play, it is the spectator that builds the meaning in fine. Our thesis examines how Shepard’s plays need to be clarified by the stage in order to be understood. The objective of our study is to identify the stage elements written within the text, and to draw out some methodological tools to describe them. The idea is to elaborate a theory of the “implicit spectator” for Shepard’s work, with the aim of studying more rigorously the reader’s response program inscribed in his works.

1 Thesis Abstract The present thesis explores six plays written by three (post)modern American playwrights - David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Oleanna, Sam Shepard's Buried Child and True West, and Suzan-Lori Parksʼ The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in order to define and analyze the functions of performative storytelling in the dramatic texts as well as its effects on the characters' identity. In Reading Narrative, J. Hillis Miller analyzes performative storytelling as a human shaped process that people use in order to translate events into meaning and meaning into shared information. Moreover, in Narrative as Performance, Marie Maclean demonstrates the importance of this device in recalibrating human memory and communication and in enriching the traditional mimetic process used in theatre. These ideas are closely followed in the aforementioned American plays through the lenses of the most prominent themes of the end of the twentieth century American theatre. Each of the three American writers uses performative storytelling to delineate socio-political themes. David Mamet comments on the artificiality of the American self, Sam Shepard speaks about the importance of familial past and relationships, whereas Suzan-Lori Parks describes the impact of major national narratives on the...

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This paper examines violence and masculinity in Sam Shepard's work as a symptom of war trauma, apparent in his characterization of several of his male characters as war veterans and the violent language accompanying his other characters. War becomes a cultural disease infesting and destroying the family on Shepard's stage.

Review of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xi + 199 pp., $90.00.

Excerpt: In 1975, Bob Dylan invited Sam Shepard, the young playwright who had ignited the Off-Broadway and London theatre scene, to go on tour with him in order to write scenes and dialogue for a film of the Rolling Thunder Revue.

The purpose of this thesis is to undertake a thorough analysis of Sam Shepard's approach to the character in a selection of his plays from the 1970s. Instead of approaching characters as compact entities with fixed character features the thesis focuses on their instability and changeability and attempts to ascribe characters' transformations to dynamic non-subjective forces and to identify ego-loss as a partially liberating process that nonetheless confronts the characters with the unknown and is accompanied by fear of self-loss. From the theoretical vantage point of the collaborative writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the thesis equates the transformations of Shepard's characters and their inability to locate the "self" with the schizophrenic experience. As a musical genre based on variability, jazz, as well as its inherent form of expression, improvisation, are utilized as points of departure in the analysis of characters' instability in plays Suicide in Bb and Angel City. Furthermore, in Angel City, the phenomenon of film in the USA and the desire for success and fame intensified by it are perceived as instruments of manipulation and illusion, which characters easily succumb to and which severely alter their sense of reality. Moreover, the environment of filmmaking is introduced as a...

本文以紀德根據盾徽所提出之內在重複結構，探討美國劇作家山姆謝普的「家庭劇三部曲」。〈烈火家園〉結尾的預言故事說明了家庭成員互相毀滅的行為模式，〈埋葬的孩子〉劇中所揭發的弒子秘密與舞台上的演出相對應，〈西部實錄〉劇中的西部電影大綱正是男主角兄弟鬩牆之爭的寫照。 / Chapter I relates the American playwright Sam Shepard’s life and career. Chapter II introduces the evolution of the idea of "mise en abyme." Chapter III interprets the concluding fable in "Curse of the Starving Class" as the mise en abyme of the play. Chapter IV interprets the secret of the child murder as the duplication of the action of "Buried Child" on stage. Chapter V interprets the Western scenario in "True West" as a reflection of the two brothers’ sibling rivalry in the play.

While the gothic in its various interpretations is well established in contemporary culture, the traditional form, rooted in its late eighteenth century literary conventions, would seem to have little relevance for theatre audiences today. A reappraisal of the convention's foundations, however, offers the playwright opportunities to explore new narratives in which the tradition can be re-inflected in the present. An analysis of the writing of my play Burn, which presents as a contemporary family drama, will demonstrate how the narrative can be structured with deliberate reference to the established tropes of the classic gothic mode. It will be shown that a re-engagement with the tradition in concert with new interpretations of the gothic can reinvigorate the form as a mode of playwriting practice.