Sam Shepard’s Action: The Broken Community

Abstract

In Action, Shepard’s method is both rigorous and less ostentatious. He examines the experience and represents the actual problems encountered by the actor as he confronts his audience. Without the security of a consistent character, all the actor can experience is the enduring presence of himself and the other actors on the stage, and the ever-present necessity of action to relieve the burden of existence. It may well be that Beckett is the inspiration in this, but there is an important difference. Beckett’s method is deeply rationalist and show minds, however desperate, insistently ordering the games and rituals which piece out their time within the play. Shepard is more impressionistic and allusive in the way he works, and in Action, he emphasizes the arbitrariness of actions. Both audience and actor feel the strain of trying to interrelate the events of the play, and for the actor this means revealing gaps in the performance, the moments where as he moves from action to action, there is a ‘stasis’. For the actors ‘statis’ represents a break down in concentration, the collapse of his imagined world and the loss of the creative scheme of intentions and actions.