Sam Shepard: The Shepard Project - Early Works by Sam Shepard

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The Shepard Project: Early Works by Sam Shepard

Chicago

Icarus's Mother

Killer's Head

Four H Club

A young man raging in his bathtub; three young men bent on a rampage of mindless destruction; a menacing beach party of betrayals and sexual manipulation; a murderer in the electric chair rhapsodizing about horses and agonizing for freedom. Four fragmented, violent, poetic incursions into the uniquely American landscape of Sam Shepard.

Before Sam Shepard was a Pulitzer Prize Winner and a Broadway sensation, before he was recognized as one of the seminal voices of the second half of the Twentieth Century, American Theatre, he was an edgy, raw, experimental playwright who knew no rules, obeyed no conventions, and took no prisoners. He was the wild man of the new off-Broadway theatre movement. He brought a new immediacy and urgency to playwriting: tearing up the language, lunging forward, moving sideways, doubling back, an urgent, unreal, weirdly mythic landscape of his own imagination drawn out of the tortured underbelly of the American cultural mind. These early plays show the young Shepard finding that voice, creating that new landscape and mapping out the Shepard country of obsession, hunger, violence, and betrayal that is so uniquely his own.

Written by: Sam Shepard
Chicago, Icarus's Mother, Killer's Head directed by: Frédérique Michel
Four H Club directed by Stephen Pocock
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Produced by: Stephen Pocock
Cast: Carlos Alvarado, Jeff Boyer, Scott Collins, Liz Davies, Jeff Decker, Andrea Isco, Paul Rubenstein, Shan Serafin, Leonard Shields, Raquel Silva