The Unseen Hand and Other Plays

by Sam Shepard

If you visit Sam Shepard country, expect to find bayous, deserts, and junkyards where dreams rust alongside abandoned '51 Chevys. Prepare to meet broken gunmen and refugees from distant galaxies, slavering swamp things and California Highway Patrolmen gone high-tech and blood simple. It is a country whose creator does nothing less than renew America's myths. And sometimes he invents them from scratch. In these fourteen darkly funny, furiously energetic early works for the theater, our most audacious living playwright sets genres and archetypes spinning, with results that are utterly mesmerizing.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Classics, American

383 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1968

About the author

Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the early 1980s I had my Sam Shepard phase. Nostalgia took me back to his early plays. Some fell flat. But others took me back to what I'd found so captivating. The desert settings. (In the late Seventies I went to college in California and had my own crazy escapades out in the deserts.) The mythic imagination. The food fights. The goofball mystics. Reading these plays again, I notice the religious quality, the yearning for transcendence in a cartoon world of broken cowboys and UFOs. I'm glad nostalgia took me back!

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Unseen Hand" is wonderful absurdist/expressionist drama. Three brothers who are mythological incarnations of old west figures, are confronted by a contemporary urban youth who gets alien messages via an "Unseen Hand". Kid Blue, the Cisco Kid and the Sycamore Kid have to face the viability of their own existence as mythological figures in a modern world that contains enough schizophrenia as to make them seem tame.

This collection also contains three superb one-acts which won Obie awards, "Chicago," "Icarus' Children," and "Red Cross" all take on different aspects of contemporary suburban life, turning the ideas on their head in the face of unexpected situations. In "Red Cross" for instance, a man turns his back on a beautiful young wife when he suddenly and unexpectedly falls deeply in love with a sarcastic, depressed and out-of-shape cleaning lady whom he jsut met at a motel room. "Chicago" and "Icarus' Children" are also about young marrieds trying to cope with a contemporary life they find surreal. The surreal theatre of Sam Shepard fits these dark, angstful storeis wonderfully.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading what so ever written by Shepard means going through a shortened social history of America after ww II, and up till the end of 20.century. Plots are so simple and dialogues are not very much sophisticated. Maybe some of works by Shepard are not as interesting as the others, but for those whom are interested in sociology, and drama as writing-art, will enjoy reading or watching works by Shepard. Reading simple and plain plays by Shepard gives you dare to sit and write about whatsoever plot you have in your mind. Many of his plays are so easy, but honest, fluent and great as well. After watching Paris, Texas by Wenders, I believe Wenders shots matches with Shepard’s atmosphere and dialogues. ”Few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage as Sam Shepard. His plays are performed on and off Broadway and in all the major regional American theatres. They are also widely performed and studied in Europe, finding both a popular and a scholarly audience" .
با وجودی که سام شپارد، موضوعاتی گاه پیش پا افتاده را با زبانی ساده و در عین حال بصورتی حیرت انگیز طرح می کند، نمی دانم چرا تا کنون به فارسی برگردانده نشده اند، یا احتمالن من ندیده ام. خواندن شپارد اگر هیچ نباشد، دست کم درس بزرگی ست برای آنها که می خواهند بنویسند، و آنها که سال هاست می نویسند اما آن چنان سنگین که انگار "وزنه برداری" می کنند! آثار سام شپارد به نمایش نامه ها و داستان های کوتاهش محدود نمی شوند. او در زمینه ی موسیقی جاز و پاپ هم کار کرده و برخی از سروده هایش برای خوانندگان صاحب نام، مشهور است. سام شپارد بازیگر سینما و تیاتر هم هست و در برخی از فیلم ها همچون "فرانسیس" یا "دیگه نیا دم در" (ویم وندرس) با همسرش "جسیکا لنگ" همبازی بوده است. سام شپارد هم چنین نقد تیاتر و سینما هم می نویسد و برخی از نقدهایش در مجلات مشهور انگلیسی زبان منتشر می شوند.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can see why Shepard confesses to being embarrassed about some works in this collection. (Good luck finding a first edition with the misogynist "Shaved Splits.") But there's excitingly bold and risky stuff here too. I don't know why one-act festivals don't surface "4-H Club," "Red Cross," "Icarus's Mother" or "Cowboys #2" more often. The full-length "Back Bog Beast Bait" is waiting for rediscovery by a young director with balls. Early Shepard is an ongoing experiment ready to begin. Ka-boom.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a really interesting play, but it just didn’t quick sit with me well. It was just a bit too strange for me. Basically, it’s a modern play that breaks down time. It’s got elements from different time periods all mashed into one (new modern races, wild west behavior and the present with its many highways).

Needless to say, it’s just not a play I would read on my own time. It’s not bad for a Fantasy/Sci-Fi class or even for just a Literature class, but if it were my choice; no thanks.

review cross-posted on my blog: SpectacleAglow

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

This a collection of Shepard's early work. The development and direction of his style is evident in every piece. There's a raw, rough quality and having read Shepard's thought on these plays, he should taken more time in refining the work. His stream of conscientiousness writing didn't serve him well in these short plays and taking more time, going back, and reworking them would've have made them more enduring.

But reading them of course is important but not necessary to appreciate his later accomplishments.

[j_ay · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Unseen Hand ***oo
The Rock Garden ****o
Chicago **000
Icarus's Mother **ooo
4-H Club ***oo
Fourteen Hundred Thousand **000
Red Cross ***oo
Cowboys #2 **000
Forensic & The Navigators ***oo
The Holy Ghostly ***oo
Operation Sidewinder ***oo
The Mad Dog Blues **ooo
Back Bog Beast Bait **ooo
Killer's Head **ooo


Some early signs of great plays to come.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some crazy freaking plays, and I like it. Just couldn't figure out what the hell was going on in some of them, but they all would be fun to perform or see performed.

[Alfavat]

ok
yes
read

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logging this after officially finishing everything (except for the closing one-act play, which I'll log separately).

The Unseen Hand and The Holy Ghostly are both masterpieces. Both of them are incredible, and worth owning this collection in order to have copies of them handy.

Many of the others are solid-to-good, and all of them show plenty of potential for what Shepard would go on to do over the rest of his career.

"Shaved Splits" is available in a Kindle version of this collection (though not in the print edition), and my review for that one is as follows: bad and clumsy; sexually explicit and replete with charged language, and the whole point of it seems to be no different from many of Shepard’s other (and better) works. A frustratingly surface-level illustration of the conflict between the haves and have-nots during this era. And the whole “Asian character dances in the background throughout the whole scene” thing just seems bizarre to me as a piece of staging. Like, I don’t even think it’s malicious, it’s just weird and kind of stupid.

[meena · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Cowboys #2" is the play your sophomore year drama teacher makes you read so you can explore existentialism and you don't realize until your done that shepard was just on shrooms when he wrote it (that being said, amazing play!)

[Matthew Koebele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hit or miss. But goddamn if the hits aren’t some of the best most enjoyable writing you’ll ever see.

[Booksquirm · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are like 1 or 2 good/interesting plays in this collection (The Unseen Hand being the best one) but the rest are…pretty awful. Some don’t even make sense at all.