Sam Shepard is a prolific American playwright, screenwriter, and film actor. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child and has written over 40 plays. Shepard is known for exploring disillusionment with the American Dream in his works. He has also acted in numerous Hollywood films, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Right Stuff.
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and film actor born in 1943 in Illinois. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his comedy Buried Child. He is a prolific playwright, with more than forty plays to his name, and has also written extensively for Hollywood.
Sam Shepard moved to New York in his late teens, working Off-Off-Broadway. Lui started writing early and has been produced several times by the Theater Genesis in the church of San Marco. Although he appeared on stage quite a bit during this period, it wasn’t until a little later that he fully broke into the scene as an actor.
In the mid-1970s Sam Shepard moved to San Francisco, becoming associated with the Magic Theater. It was there, in 1978, that Sam Shepard premiered Buried Child, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize, becoming the first Off-Off-Broadway show to win the honor. After Buried Child, Sam Shepard continued to write at an accelerated pace. Some of his notable creations include Curse of the Starving Class, Tongues with Joseph Chaikin, Fool for Love, Simpatico and A Lie of the Mind.
In 2001 Sam Shepard wrote The God of Hell, an indictment of the Republican response to the 9/11 tragedy. The God of Hell follows a farming family whose life is thrown into turmoil by an overzealous patriotic employee of the United States government. In 2007 Sam Shepard released his most recent play, Kicking a Dead Horse, which premiered at the Public Theater.
Buried Child, the play that made Sam Shepard famous, follows a family falling apart against the backdrop of 1970s economic woes in the United States. The sons of the family, who are supposed to take over the family business, are in fact unable to do so, and watch as the farm fails and the family slowly degenerates. Explore the topic of disillusionment, particularly with the American Dream, and the inability of modern Americans to achieve the American Dream and live up to the mythology of America, as well as America’s inability to make those dreams possible .
This theme runs through the works of Sam Shepard, and has only become more acute as time has gone on, with Kicking a Dead Horse a deeply painful look at America’s drift from its core ideals and romanticism. At the same time, Sam Shepard paints comical and touching scenes through which to tell the stories of him, and most of his plays and screenplays are funny to laugh at times.
Since the late 1970s Sam Shepard has also been a staple of Hollywood films. He has appeared in films such as The Right Stuff, Steel Magnolias, The Pelican Brief, Snow Falling on Cedars, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Stealth. He has also received accolades for his acting from numerous places, most notably an Academy Award nomination in 1984 for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.
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