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KICKING A DEAD HORSE. Written and directed by Sam Shepard. The Public Theater, New York City. 2 August 2008.
In the old Sam Shepard's work, meaning was buried-often literally, under layers of dirt or in America's forgotten backyards-and could be exhumed only fleetingly and at great cost. Plays like Buried Child, Action, and Curse of the Starving Class peered through the shuttered-up windows of the American myth, deploying language and images of such idiosyncratic density that audiences could not so much decipher them as bask in their mysterious, charged glow. In recent years, though, Shepard's writing has changed: his dialogue is increasingly direct, his opinions undisguised; 2004's The God of Hell was an unflinchingly Aristotelian indictment of post-9/11 America. In his latest work, Kicking a Dead Horse-directed by Shepard himself and featuring longtime collaborator Stephen Rea in the central role-narrative has given way again to existential meditation, but to the opposite effect.
This time, Shepard's images-their meanings no longer oblique but deliberately transparent-are being, laboriously and with little success, reinterred in the topsoil from which they were drawn. The play comments, as Shepard always has, on the delusions and death of American national identity; but it is more pointedly an observation about Shepard himself, an attempt to ride back out into the landscape of his early works and, perhaps, lay that terrain to rest. Obsessively self-referential and haunted by the discovery that artistic authenticity is as elusive as authentic national identity, Kicking a Dead Horse summons the specter of Waiting for Godot in its exploration of a theatrical void; Shepard,...