The theme of familial disintegration in select plays of Sam Shepard

The five plays of Sam Shepard, Curse of Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind explore with the theme of disintegration of family. Sam Shepard describes family after family which are driven by suspicion, guilt, betrayal, all of which reduce people to mechanical relationships. In all his plays there is no family which is bonded by filial love and mutual respect. Husbands and wives, parents and children and children themselves either fall short of or exceed in the required emotional response. Shepard depicts the family as a paradoxical union – life giving – nurturing, protective, destructive and unco-operative, but above all necessary and inescapable. Sexual jealousy, fear of being, betrayed, nervous breakdowns psychological malaise are some of characteristics of Shepard’s plays. Shepard writes in the realistic form. None of his plays has a broken narrative and no play dramatizes the past. The question whether Shepard is or is not a modernist is not a matter of speculation. An examination of his characters and their emotions such as anxiety, fear, anger and guilt qualifies him to the company of Modernist playwrights.