Authenticity, Self-Invention and the Power of Storytelling: Sam Shepard’s Postmillennial Work

Authors

  • Paulina Mirowska University of Łódź, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2353-6098.6.04

Keywords:

Sam Shepard, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Field Day, The UK City of Culture, Derry/Londonderry, authenticity, self-invention

Abstract

The article reflects upon Sam Shepard’s playwrighting in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, paying particular attention to his last play, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), written specifically for the Derry/Londonderry City of Culture celebrations in 2013, and originally produced by the renowned Field Day Theatre Company. The article seeks to offer an insight into Shepard’s mature multilayered text, which, in many respects, looks back upon almost fifty years of his artistic creativity and, at the same time, expands his vision. It also addresses the realisation of Shepard’s play in performance and the significance of his text in an interplay of multiple creative inputs involved in the production process.

While revisiting the familiar landscapes and themes, Shepard’s most recent work negotiates the boundaries between the actual and the fictitious, raising debates about the persistence of myths, mortality and the haunting legacies of the past. Richly intertextual and conspicuously metatheatrical, it grapples with questions of authenticity, performativity and storytelling – the narratives that are passed down, and how they form and inform our lives. It also engages with, and further problematises, issues of personal and cultural identity, which constitute Shepard’s most durable thematic threads, revealing both the dramatist’s acute concern with fateful determinism and commitment to self-invention. Significantly, while Shepard’s postmillennial output highlights the author’s ongoing preoccupation with instability and frontiers of various sorts (from those topographic, temporal and sociopolitical to those of language and art), it equally intimates his attentiveness to correspondences between times, lands and cultures.

Author Biography

Paulina Mirowska, University of Łódź, Poland

Paulina Mirowska is senior lecturer at the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź (Poland), where she specialises in modern and contemporary British and American drama. She obtained her PhD from the University of Łódź with a dissertation on the micro- and macropolitical dimensions of Harold Pinter’s oeuvre. She is co-editor of Reading Subversion and Transgression (Łódź University Press, 2013) and of Diversity and Homogeneity: The Politics of Nation, Ethnicity and Gender (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Her recent academic interests centre upon the Irish-American interplay in the work of contemporary American dramatist Sam Shepard.

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Published

2020-12-30

How to Cite

Mirowska, P. (2020). Authenticity, Self-Invention and the Power of Storytelling: Sam Shepard’s Postmillennial Work. Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre, 6(1), 28–39. https://doi.org/10.18778/2353-6098.6.04