n/a

New York

1965

-

in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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-

One Act

3

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: three young men in a trash filled apartment, with occasional outbreaks of violence and shouting

New York

1975

-

Faber & Faber, London

1975

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Four Short Plays

One Act

2

2

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: two shaven headed couples sit around a wooden table and wait for and finally consume a real roasted turkey, motiveless and puposefuless like a chimpanzee's tea party

San Francisco

1976

-

in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York

1976

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

Play with Music

-

-

-

Notes: music by Bob Feldman

Synopsis: Los Angeles and a young magician and fixer is summoned to work a 'slight miracle' on a disaster movie

New York

1971

-

in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

with music

One Act

4

3

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: two cowboys are hired by woman to fight a monster ravaging the Louisiana countryside

New York

1973

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

Short Play

One Act

3

-

-

Notes: televised 1972

Synopsis: phone rings as someone in Scotland wants to buy to American expatriates greyhound, milkman solves all the problems as a singing telegram arrives

San Francisco

1978

-

in "Buried Child and Other Plays", Faber, London

1980

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

Tragedy

5

2

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbors a dark secretyears earlier the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy and suggests the perhaps slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin.

New York

1965

-

in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1967

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

3

3

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: a comedy about a young man in a bathtub

Edinburgh

1971

-

in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

2

1

-

Notes: written with Patti Smith

Synopsis: games as woman with taste for French poetry wants to turn Slim into a rock and roll star

New York

1964

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

One Act

4

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: two young men in an unidentified space act out their various fantasies until finally turning on the audience

New York

1967

-

in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

4

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: two young men sit and talk about whether it is likely to rain

London

1977

-

in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York

1976

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

Play/Drama

7

2

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: The setting is a farmhouse somewhere in the American West, inhabited by a family who have enough to eat, but not enough more to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father is a drunk; the mother a frowzy slattern; the daughter precocious beyond her years; and the son a deranged idealist who wants something better but has no clear idea of how to attain it. The action is filled with changes and counter-changes as the family decides to sell the house to raise money; the mother talks of running off to Europe or Mexico, but ends up asleep on the kitchen table; the father sobers up and tries to take control; the daughter is blown up in the family car; and the son is brutalized and bloodied by the evil forces besetting them. In the end of the play its people become a metaphor for the underside of American lifethe benighted innocents forever pursuing a diminished dream, and the illusion of fulfillment which remains ever beyond their reach.

Cafe La MaMa, NY, USA >>>

1965

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

One Act

1

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: about a black guy on a park bench

-

-

-

Dramatists Play Service, NY

-

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

Play/Drama

3

1

-

Notes: Based on The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz.

Synopsis: A disheveled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored, a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded "hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay put for his own safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the underbrush he is set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory figure bears a machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut the eyes from Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in order to present this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of blue eyes" to the bewitching Consuela. The fervor of Amado's obsessed mission, his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight, push Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humor, cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite him with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela appears before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road out of the tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible.

-

-

-

Methuen Drama, London >>>

1993

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Film Script

Play/Drama

2

5

-

Notes: -

Synopsis:

San Francisco

1983

-

City Lights, San Francisco

1983

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Comedy Drama

Comedy

3

1

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: The scene is a stark motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert. May, a disheveled young woman, sits dejectedly on a rumpled bed while Eddie, a rough-spoken rodeo performer, crouches in a corner fiddling with his riding gear. When he attempts to console May, who is distressed by Eddie's frequent absences and love affairs, she seems, at first, to softenbut then she suddenly attacks him. As the recriminations pour out, and the action becomes, at times, physically violent, the desperate nature of their relationship becomes apparentthey cannot get along with, or without, one another, yet neither can subdue their burning passion. The poignancy of their situation (they are half-brother and half-sister as well as lovers) is pointed out by the play's two other characters: a hapless young man who stops by to take May to the movies and becomes the butt of Eddie's funniest yet most humiliating jokes; and a ghostly old man (perhaps their father) who sits in a rocking chair at the side of the stage, sipping whiskey and commenting wryly on what he observes. Eventually May and Eddie tire of their struggle and embracebut it is evident that the respite is temporary and that their love, the curse of the past which haunts them, will remain forever damned and hopeless.

New York

1967

-

in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

4

1

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: confused struggle between two revolutionaries and the Fxterminators, who are agents for an unnamed power holding people in a nearby prison camp

Cafe La MaMa, NY, USA >>>

1965

-

in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1967

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

3

2

-

Notes: National Education Television filmed THREE PLAYS FROM LA MAMA. They were PAVANE by Jean Claude Van Itallie, FOURTEEN HUNDRED THOUSAND by Sam Shepard, and THE RECLUSE by Paul Foster. Tom O'Horgan directed the entire program.

Synopsis: two people are building a bookcase for her fourteen hundred thousand books, assisted and watched by three others

London

1974

-

Grove Press, New York

1974

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Mystery Play

Mystery

8

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: though rescued by his brothers a Wyoming cowboy, pure at heart but destroyed in spirit, cannot recapture the world he has lost

Actors Studio Drama School Theater, NYC

2004

-

Dramatist Play Service, NY

Methuen Drama, London >>>

-

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Dark Comedy, 70 min

Comedy

3

1

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: An uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma. Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Franks old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, theyre visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously low half life.

London

1989

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

-

-

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis:

La MaMa ETC, NY European Tour) >>>

1969

-

in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1971

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

4

1

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: in an effort to catch the ghostly Chindi Ice comes to New York to camp out with his father whom he shoots after endless arguments

New York

1965

-

in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis

1967

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

-

One Act

3

2

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: five young people after finishing a 4th July barbecue watch a plane flying overhead and eventually crash

San Francisco

1977

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

Play with Music

2

2

-

Notes: based on Karen Ann Quinian case

Synopsis: woman in a coma and its effects on those around her

New York

1979

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

text for dance

Dance Play

1

-

-

Notes: dance by Daniel Nagrin

Synopsis: a man wakes up in his lover's 'rather extravagant' bed. She's not there

New Haven, Connecticut

1980

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

-

-

-

-

Notes: written with Jaques Levy

Synopsis:

Dublin: Peacock, Abbey Theatre, Ireland, EUR >>>

2007

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-

Play/Drama

1

1

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: New York art dealer Hobart Struther goes on a desert walkabout to rediscover his "authenticity" and is stranded when his horse dies. And there it is, in the middle of the stage: a life-sized dead horse. As Hobart repeatedly tries and fails to tip it into a too-small grave while telling his story, one is reminded of Beckett's love for Buster Keaton: Rea brilliantly mixes antic behaviour and deadpan delivery with this Sisyphean shtick. However, the key writer Shepard is glossing is himself. Hobart made his fortune reselling paintings of the American west at a massive markup. "What I couldn't see was how those old masterpieces would become like demons, trapping me in a life I wasn't meant for," he says. This and other references make it clear that Shepard is nodding to his own career, seeming to want to renounce his past creative patterns by sending them up. But by invoking all his familiar themes - the west, dreams of escape, tourism, violence, authenticity - Shepard re-inscribes them even as he claims to disavow them.
- Karen Fricker, Guardian

New York

1975

-

Faber & Faber, London

1975

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Monologue

Play/Drama

1

-

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: thoughts on nurturing a racehorse made horrifying by the fact that it represents the last thoughts of a young man about to be electrocuted

Magic Theatre, The, California, USA >>>

2000

-

Methuen Drama, London >>>

2006

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

full length

Play/Drama

7

1

-

Notes: 1st published Dramatist Play Service, NY

Synopsis: Two antagonistic brothers, Ray and Earl, are brought together after their father, Henry Moss, is found dead in his seedy New Mexico home. Henry was a harassing, arrogant drunk, and his sons have inherited his worst qualities. Ray is determined to uncover the mysterious circumstances of Henry's death. In three acts, the story of the father's last days unfolds in flashbacks

Promenade Theatre, New York

1985

-

New American Library, New York

Methuen Drama, London >>>

1987

If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
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Love Ballad

Play/Drama

4

4

-

Notes: -

Synopsis: Involves two desparate families connected by the marriage of the son of one (Jake) to the daughter of the other (Beth). As the play begins Beth, brain-damaged from a savage beating that Jake has given her, is being tended by her parents, Baylor and Meg. Jake sends his brother, Frankie, to Montana to see if she is dead or alive, but Beth's father, mistaking Frankie for a poacher, shoots him in the leg and takes him prisoner. Thereafter the tensions and enmities that motivate the two families grow increasingly disturbing and dangerous. Frankie falls in love with Beth, but her brother, Mike, is bitterly determined that she no longer have anything to do with her husband or his loathsome family. Meanwhile the distraught, hysterical Jake, back home in California, is nursed by his possessive mother, Lorraine, and his sister, Sally, to whom Lorraine is openly hostile. Having gotten Jake back from Beth, Lorraine is determined to keep him with her forever, but Jake soon recovers and sets out to regain his wife. In the end, however, his will fails, and he allows Beth to stay with Frankie; Lorraine burns down her house and departs for Ireland with Sally; and Jake, bereft and alone, seeks communication with his dead father by gently dispersing his ashes into the moonlighthoping to find order and meaning in the present by coming to terms with the haunting spectres of the past.

London

1974

-

-

-

I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page

-