“‘I just dropped out of nowhere,’ Sam Shepard said of his arrival in New York, at nineteen in the fall of 1963. ‘It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.’ Shepard, a refugee from his father’s farm in California, had spent eight months as an actor traveling the country by bus with a Christian theater group, the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players.”
John Lahr
Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows
“My father was full of terrifying anger.”
Sam Shepard
Over the years I read many times that the first major shift in Sam Shepard’s life that would set him on the path of becoming a great American playwright and a Hollywood actor was his involvement with the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players. Since his recent death I decided to poke around and see what I could find about the Bishop’s Company and how Shepard came to join the group.
Shepard was born in 1943 when the world was at war. The USA joined WWII following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Shepard’s father was a bomber pilot during WWII and had his own battles at home after the War ended in 1945. Being an alcoholic, with various financial setbacks, and nightmares of dropping bombs that killed people was a wicked combination that manifested itself in much conflict between the father and son.
One often wonders what makes a playwright. A lot of prose writers say that it was a love of reading and solitude that made them want to write novels and stories. Dramatists, it seems, are always cursed and blessed with a family member who is a hysteric, and who cannot not make drama.”
Hilton Als, The New Yorker
I don’t know if Shepard and novelist Pat Conroy (whose father was a fighter pilot in WWII and Vietnam) ever got together and compared notes about their childhood, but they had a lot in common having violent and abusive father’s which was reflected in their writings.
Shepard graduated from high school in 1961 and it’s understandable that he could be looking to get away from his father. What biographers miss is that Shepard graduated from Duarte High School which is only 30 minutes from Hollywood, California.
But Shepard apparently didn’t have his sights set on Hollywood as a teenager. He was more interested in the nearby California farm land and horse racing at the Santa Anita Raceway in nearby Arcadia. He attended Mt. San Antonio College—a community college in Walnut which was just east of where he lived. He studied agriculture and animal husbandry. After a few semesters he appeared to headed toward being a farmer or a veterinarian.
So this is a good time to stop and asked again what changed in his life that put 19-year-old Sam Shepard on track to become a great American playwright?
“When I first left home, I got this paper route. And I was delivering papers all over the — I had a ’51 Chevy, and I was throwing papers all around the houses and stuff. And at the end of the day, I started going through this paper. And the end of it, in the work section, there was this little ad that said actors wanted.
“And I went in and auditioned for this company. It was called the Bishop’s Company. And the great thing about it was that it was a traveling company. It was going to get the hell out of there, you know? So they hired me, and the next day, I was on a Greyhound bus to Bethlehem, Pa., and joined up with the company there. And we toured all over the place and did these one-night stands in churches, which was my first real experience with theater.”
Sam Shepard
Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross
It’s not easy to find much online about the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players but it appeared to be in one form or another from the 1950s until its demise in 2007. Its name (and I image its part of its funding) came from a Bishop in the Methodist Church. It appears they did an eclectic mix of plays including Shakespeare, Shaw’s St. Joan, and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, as well as some original work dealing with social issues.
“We did little short plays, adaptations of literature mostly and we did them in churches. It amazed me that you could just get a bunch of people together and write some stuff and do it and get an audience. People would actually come and see it. From nothing, you could make something brand new.”
Sam Shepard
The Guardian interview in 2003 with John O’Mahony
[Actors in a traveling theatre group] have full-time jobs as actors. They’re getting the paid opportunity to travel when they’re young. They have jobs with very little supervision – as long as they show up at the right place at the right time, no one cares what they do with the rest of their time. And, if they’re wise, they are learning experience about performing that can’t be taught in a classroom. They’ll learn how to perform to amazingly different audiences from day to day and night to night and maintain performance energy regardless of conditions. That lesson alone is worth the whole tour.
Nathan Thomas
The Best Job in the World
So after eight months of touring and performing Shepard landed in New York City in 1962 or ’63 and decided to stay getting a job as a busboy in Greenwich Village, and set about getting involved in off-off Broadway theatre.
His first play was performed at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in 1964. According to Wikipedia on the second floor of the church was a 30X35 foot space home to experimental theater “in an intimate 70-seat blackbox with sixteen lights and nine dimmers, spare sets, minimal props and a focus on hard-driving language and nihilistic themes, Theatre Genesis became a sharp-edged testing ground for new work.”
“We had no money. I can remember getting props off the street. We’d take Yuban coffee cans, punch a hole in them, and use them for lights. We did it all from scratch, which was pretty incredible.”
Sam Shepard on the Theatre Genesis
Ralph Cook was lay minister of the arts at that Episcopal Church from 1963-1969 and according Playbill, “Mr. Cook decided Theatre Genesis would be devoted to nurturing young playwrights and produce plays that spoke directly to the experience of the downtrodden citizens in the immediately area.”
Shepard’s early one act plays were not universally accepted (the great playwright Tennessee Williams once said he “wouldn’t cross the street to see a Sam Shepard play”), and there are reports that he was discouraged enough to think about moving back home to California, but there was one Village Voice review in 1964 that had to be a lifeline to Shepard who would go on to win 11 Obie Awards for his writing and directing, as well as a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.
- “I know it sounds pretentious and unprepossessing: ‘Theatre Genesis… dedicated to the new playwright’ But they have actually found a new playwright, [and] he has written a pair of provocative and genuinely original plays… Shepard is feeling his way, working with an intuitive approach to language and dramatic structure and moving into an area between ritual and naturalism, where character transcends psychology, fantasy breaks down literalism, and the patterns of ordinariness have their own lives. His is a gestalt theater which evokes the existence behind behavior.”
Michael Smith
The Village Voice
Would Sam Shepard have become Sam Shepard without the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players and Theatre Genesis? We’ll never know. But every writer needs space to find their way. To find their voice. Because as Shepard said he, “wasn’t born knowing how to write a play.”
Scott W. Smith