"Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They're earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They're planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But "I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root," the other brother complains. "A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.""
"Shepard-the cowboy laureate of American playwriting, laconic film star, and hallucinatory dismantler of the Western myth-died in 2017, yet he remains a constant presence in the theatre. His works, frequently in revival, can still knock an audience senseless, and they have never stopped calling to a certain type of actor-the mostly straight, mostly white theatre guys with an edge who fell in love with Shepard's dust-and-whiskey monologues in acting cla"
Two actors portray brothers Cricket and Coyote who oscillate between wanting to become earthworms and wanting to write a Western about brothers running amuck in the desert. Amanda Horowitz's Bad Stars uses ontological slapstick and gender play, rewiring toasters and light switches to comment on macho performance. Sam Shepard's True West presents Lee and Austin bickering over film and culminates with a typewriter smashed by a drunken Lee and a stolen fleet of toasters. Shepard fashioned a cowboy laureate persona, dismantled the Western myth, died in 2017, and remains a powerful, continuing influence on theater and actors.
Read at The New Yorker
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