Simpatico

A recommended Shepard must-read! From Cowboys (1964) at the Theater Genesis to Icarus's Mother (1965) at Café Cino to La Turista (1967) at La MaMa to The Tooth of Crime (1972) at Open Space, Shepard's "lost men" have stumbled across the stage in a way that has chronicled the fascinating interstice between eras and between generations. Shepard represents the desert poet, the rambling musician, the ill-fated prairie homesteader of American cultural memory, alone in a crowd and unassuaged by logic or love. Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), and True West (1980) moved him away from the perception that he was simply an avant-garde artist, an experimenter, and established his style and wide identification as a mainstream American playwright. In Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), he joined Rabe and Mamet as portrayers of American masculinity in conflict with warring emotions and sexual violence. A Lie of the Mind, particularly, drew a line in the sand of public recognition as a dense work of loft and dimension, an imprecation and apologia of the last lone white male bellowing in the bleak boozy night. As for Simpatico, it touches on all the Shepardian themes in its exploration of men, and women, on the edge, entering into a precarious and ever-shifting balance of power. It is, in the words of one director, "a meditation on heartache". Shepard, in his potentially pessimistic world, won't break into an emotional investigation of heartache per se, but examines the undercarriage of the heart and its wild persistent beat in an empty landscape. When Simpatico opened at New York's Public Theatre in the fall of 1994, critics raved and razzed in equal measure. Some audiences may not want to take the journey, but there are riches to be mined here. In jolting shift from Kentucky to California, Simpatico traces a web of secrets, betrayal, love, loss, and black comic hope. Sam Shepard's American master-series continues.

To me Shepard is saying that whether you are a pauper living in a hovel or a gentleman living on an estate, the cantankerous affects of life without morals will get you. All participants in the acts captured in the 'pictures' were ultimately victims. However, describing this play exclusively as a moral treatise would be a moral outrage! This play is classic Shepard. The characters are edgy, the dialogue is light and quick, the setting desert western, and the plot is charged. Shepard's characters seemed to me to be at once unbelievable, and yet a little bit more like myself than I'd like to admit.

Sam Shepard's SIMPATICO is by far the best play ever written. Gripping dialogue, suspense, romance, intrigue, comic relief, deciet, lost love, and turmoil fill the pages of this play with unstoppable reading pleasure! When Vinnie calls his best friend, Lyle, down to his down-and-out home in Cucumonga California, they start discussing a conflict which has been unresolved for over twenty years now. My favorite scene is when Rosie Carter, Lyle's wife and Vinnie's old girlfriend, comes in. She has the most important character, and her eleventh-hour performance is remarkable and simply powerful. Rosie is the tragic beauty that makes this play stand out.About the movie SIMPATICO, possibly one of the best pictures of all time. Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, and Sharon Stone. Stone shines above all as the beautiful, tragic Rosie.READ IT!