Partly an introduction to the present collection, partly an independent essay attempting to stimulate further thought on Shepard, the opening text surveys the playwright's career and evolving critical status over the past three decades, briefly positioning each of the subsequent essays within the larger debate. The paradigm of the margin and the centre as developed by poststructuralists is relied on as a conceptual framework in an attempt to come to terms with some irresolvable tensions pertaining to Shepard's work: those between actor and writer, text and performance, artist and critic. These tensions, deriving from a lingering logocentric impulse and its concomitant suppression of writing, are exemplified primarily in the essay “Language, Visualization and the Inner Library”, though Cowboys #2 and Action are also discussed at more length, for their ambiguous acknowledgements of the textual inscription of Shepard's performance aesthetics.
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