Staging “things”: Realism and the theatrical object in Shepard's theatre

Abstract

Drawing upon the tradition of theatrical realism, with its radically material conception of the stage, Sam Shepard's theater exploits the perceptual and phenomenological instabilities inherent in realism's staging of physical objects. As verisimilitude increased in the realist tradition, it risked disrupting the very illusion it was imported to serve: the more the stage imported the materials of a world other than itself, the more the staging of this increasingly “actual” world called attention to itself, violating the otherness underpinning theatrical illusionism. To the extent that Shepard exploits realism as a scenic aesthetic, he does so in order to dismantle it from within, exploiting the phenomenal instability of theatrical objects that has haunted the realist tradition from its beginnings. Shepard liberates the object from its restricted place within a subject/object dualism in order to disclose its primary modes of interaction with the phenomenal, or “lived”, body. Shepard's attention to the stage's phenomenological dimension suggests a different valuation of theatrical realism from that generally offered by contemporary theory.

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