Portrait of the artist as a young musician, writer, actor
Titel:
Portrait of the artist as a young musician, writer, actor
Auteur:
Cohn, Ruby
Verschenen in:
Contemporary theatre review
Paginering:
Jaargang 8 (1998) nr. 3 pagina's 67-77
Jaar:
1998-08
Inhoud:
This paper explores the recurring features amidst the shifting shapes of Shepard's beleaguered (literal) stage artists. Removed from the particulars of specific localities, aside from Hollywood for those involved in the film industry, the artists' position is tenuous and isolated, while also susceptible to the pressures of materialism, media, and popular culture. Thus besieged, they waver between simple commitment to their craft and complicity in the sell-out to power and fame, a wavering that stifles their creativity or results in a substitution of image for reality. Formally the pressure gets exemplified by Shepard's more or less successful amalgamation of different musical, literary and cinematographic genres (melodrama, western, sci-fi, disaster movie). That the plays with artists thus attest to the theatre's transformative power is brought home by A Lie of the Mind, featuring in Beth a victim of and a tribute to the profession.
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