Sam Shepard

Wednesday

Anne Margaret Daniel

Sam Shepard’s life was as dramatic as his theater

Sam Shepard and I crossed paths several times when we were both living near Charlottesville, Virginia, he with Jessica Lange and their family, and me as a student at the University of Virginia. He towered over passersby on the Downtown Mall, walking as if invisible spurs should be clinking on his bootheels, mane of dark floppy hair pushed back off his forehead and behind his ears, keen eyes above a quick grin. I last saw Shepard 20 years later, having a coffee and reading the Daily Racing Form in a Greenwich Village restaurant; he looked even better then. He was a true Renaissance man. There he was, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, charged with writing a screenplay for a movie somehow set in the concert tour.

sam shepard

Tuesday

Alex Clark

A cherry orchard, three sisters and a summer romance: Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, reviewed

From our UK edition

Two plays guide the reader through Tom Lake, Ann Patchett’s ninth novel: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the story of ordinary lives in a small New Hampshire community in the early years of the 20th century, which, with its radically stripped-back staging, sets time and place in the context of all time and place, and enjoins its audience to ponder what is truly valuable in human life; and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the story of the battle for an estate that throbs with conflict, violence and, ultimately, destruction. Patchett’s mind is on the twin forces of preservation and entropy: our desperate attempts to cling to the local and the familiar as the wider world threatens and besieges us; our need to both depart and return, to embrace and exclude.