'Resonating with an experience of living'

 

“In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.” – Sam Shepard

 

Born in Illinois in November of 1943, Shepard (who died in 2017) was a playwright, actor and director, the only playwright ever nominated for an acting Academy Award – (portraying pilot Chuck Yeager in the movie The Right Stuff).  Shepard also won a Pulitzer Prize for playwriting – for Buried Child – and was nominated for or won every major award for his screenwriting and theatrical productions..

 

Shepard also taught playwriting and other aspects of theatre at theatre workshops, festivals, and universities.  Honored for his work with election to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was named for the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Master American Dramatist Award in 2009.

                                                                                                                                            

Away from screenwriting and playwrighting he authored numerous short stories, essays and memoirs but never tackled a novel, even though he said he had some ideas for one.

 

“To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem,” he said.  “To write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, (even if) essentially what you're after is the same thing.”