in two recent productions, sam shepard’s plays remind us that family traumas have long afterlives.
Two recent Sam Shepard productions in Chicago offered a fine opportunity to take stock of how the playwright‘s works feel long after their 1970s and 80s moment, when they were written. One might think they would not have aged well, but in fact they are surprisingly fresh. This might be because one of Shepard’s key themes was the recurring return of old family wounds and traumas. Steppenwolf’s Fool for Love and Raven Theater’s A Lie of the Mind form the final two installments of the five plays that began with “The Family Trilogy” and concluded with these two pieces. Both are both Westerns of a sort, but postmodern ones. The frontier isn’t receding here, as in the classic Western film, and the past is not fading. Instead, difficult personal histories have firmly lassoed the future in a destructive loop.
In Fool for Love, a couple keeps trying to break up or get back together, they can’t decide. We eventually learn of a dark family secret keeping them at once attracted to and repulsed by one another. The story takes on a hypnotic, repetitive quality as the couple keeps retelling their origin tale in different iterations. An older, fatherly man lingers as a ghost in the play—at once a reminder of this secret and himself pulled into the increasingly surreal plot.
The couple become like two magnets shifting phases between positive and negative. They are tightly wound, the coils within like springs about to unleash their force. Or perhaps we could see them as moths to a flame, trying to fly away from it only to turn back once again, inevitably drawn to the dangerous glow. Most of all in the play, misrecognitions pile up in a growing, terrifying momentum that builds slowly but steadily. Some kind of demise is coming, but we don’t quite know how it will happen or why exactly it is happening. There is a disquietude that intensifies as the characters return to the old injuries that were there all along, barely below the surface, repressed but unavoidable, erupting once again by play’s end to rip open old scars.
Similarly, in Raven Theater’s A Life of the Mind, the play begins with misrecognition. One of the main characters, Jake, can’t read the numbers on a pay phone. From there, people get confused with animals, time gets scrambled, no one can recover from past mistakes, and all are trapped in a kind of miserable, inescapable flight from previous errors that they try to correct, but are simply unable to overcome. They are stuck.
These two plays, as with many of Shepard’s pieces, seem to center on the men—perhaps in the typical Western fashion. Yet the “strong, silent types” are anything but; they are numbed, deeply in denial, fearing the truth and trying to push it so far down it will never return. Until it does, often in explosive violence. In these 2025 productions, however, it was the female characters who seemed most intriguing, trying as they were to deal with failed, flawed men in patriarchal structures growing increasingly brittle and broken. The women in the plays reach for something beyond the traumas of the past. Yet even they, ultimately, cannot escape.
Watching these two family dramas made me think of another playwright of the same generation also concerned with families, but rarely compared to Shepard: August Wilson. Wilson and Shepard both wrote about familial traumas and past wounds that haunt the current action of their dramas. Wilson, of course, did so in terms of African American history in his hometown of Pittsburgh; Shepard did so in the setting of the American West. With both playwrights, nonetheless, personal crises from earlier moments in life press in on the present. Painful memories, trying to be avoided but inescapable, provide the fuel powering the action. Traumatic family pasts haunt the plays of both Wilson and Shepard with a raw, uneasy, almost at times queasy sense of dread. They lend a tense rawness to the affairs and they often, like the Fates in ancient drama, create an almost determinative quality. Trying to run away from family traumas, characters are inevitably drawn back to them. Return of the repressed.
In Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, not only do characters get thrown back into difficult personal memories, but a recurring theme is also the collective memory of the Middle Passage, symbolized by the sounds of the bones of the ancestors lost at sea, suffering bondage. All that trauma haunts the plays at both intimate and historical levels. In Shepard’s plays, it is not bones but fire that becomes the recurring motif. At the end of both Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, we are left with things in flame. This suggests the destructiveness of past family traumas, a sort of unquenchable fire.
Yet maybe they also offer the flicker of a potential purification. Glimmering in the distance, off stage, the flames do not propose the permanent end of past pain, but they do suggest perhaps some kind of hope, a glow, maybe even a regeneration out of the recurrent cycle of past injuries replayed over and over. The family traumas cannot be vanquished in Shepard’s telling, but they might illuminate, ever so slightly, dreamy reconfigurations of the past in the future. The suffering does not stop, but the final images of fire nonetheless crack and split the past open. These plays end, we might say, with Shepard proposing that we flip the adage a fellow countercultural Western myth maker—the musician Neil Young: it might actually be better to fade away than to burn out.