Fifteen One-Act Plays: An expanded edition of the collection The Unseen Hand and Other Plays

by Sam Shepard

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard’s plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this
 
Ages of the Moon
Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley
Short Life of Trouble
The Unseen Hand
The Rock Garden
Chicago
Icarus’s Mother
4H Club
Fourteen Hundred Thousand
Red Cross
Cowboys #2
Forensic & The Navigators
The Holy Ghostly
Back Bog Beast Bait
Killer’s Head

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Theatre, American, Classics

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Sam Shepard was an American artist who worked as an award-winning playwright, writer and actor. His many written works are known for being frank and often absurd, as well as for having an authentic sense of the style and sensibility of the gritty modern American west. He was an actor of the stage and motion pictures; a director of stage and film; author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs; and a musician.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOLY GHOSTLY, RED CROSS, ROCK GARDEN & AGES OF THE MOON WERE AMAZING!

[Mallory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these I liked, some were just weird. I would recommend this collection for those who are already fans of Sam Shepard's plays, otherwise, you might be put off. These were my favorites: Ages of the Moon (classic Sam Shepard), Short Life of Trouble (my favorite, a conversation between Shepard himself and Bob Dylan), and 4-H Club (has a great monologue about the dangers of business).

[Dan Mccarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beauty of Shepard's one-acts is how spare, immediate and vivid they are. Forget the big, critic-pleasing themes: the language is solid but literary, and the stories are real. A good antidote to twee, overwritten work.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aside from the couple of these written in the 21st century (and appended to the collection, otherwise consisting of short pieces written in the late 60s and very early 70s), Red Cross, and the monologue Killer's Head, these one-acts are often excruciatingly bad, nearly all following the same blueprint of banality giving way to off-the-wall insanity in the form of culminating surrealist monologues or wacky hijinks. I give it 2 stars rather than 1 because there are occasional glimpses of the writer Shepard would blossom into eventually (the aforementioned works offering the most substantial of those, but 4H and Back Bog Beast Bait also have small kernels of quality) and because that proof-- that a great writer can begin his or her career with work as tedious and often plain bad as those included in this volume-- can serve as valuable encouragement to aspiring writers who may stumble across this accursed collection. Clearly heavily indebted to Beckett, but with little of the charm or (intentional) humor of something like Endgame or Waiting for Godot, never mind the brilliance.

[BOYCOTT Musk-Trump USA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly early Sam Shepard plays from the 1960s suggestive of the themes he would address in his more mature work of the 1970s.

[Nicholas Marino]

this was bad
i didn't finish it

i guess all one acts are kind of lame but sam shepard seems like kind of a jerk off

that one anecdote about him and patti smith ruins this whole enterprise for me

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've reviewed many of the plays included here as they've appeared on this site either separately or in other collections of Shepard's work. With, of course, one key exception: "Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley," which I revsited tonight.

There's a reason it doesn't have a solo entry - it's only like 7 pages long and stands as the shortest theatrical work Shepard's produced outside of "Killer's Moon" (which was often paired with "Action," if I recall correctly. It's honestly also not super great, and I believe it was intended largely as either an exercise for students, an entry in an anthology of works from several different playwrights, or both.

Overall, it's a five-star collection, and the highlights are "The Unseen Hand," "The Holy Ghostly," and "Ages of the Moon." Many of the other entries here are lackluster and odd, but they all contribute to Shepard's evolution as a dramatist, and the cumulative impact of them is impressive.

Anyway, I'm logging this as having been finished *last* year, so it doesn't affect this year's Reading Challenge. I'm also setting the "date started" as sometime in 2016, because I believe that's when I really started approaching Shepard's body of work in earnest.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A friend and colleague gave me this to read. Actually, I think he only expected me to read the two best plays in this collection, "Ages of the Moon" and "Back Bog Beast Bait," but I ended up reading the whole thing. Drama isn't something that I'm super knowledgeable about, even though I have taught my share of plays over the years, but I'm always interested in experiencing something new. As a writer of short stories, I'm interested in the idea of economy and sometimes putting limiting conditions on what I write, so I thought I might learn something from the minimalism in narrative and setting a one-act play can necessitate. While I definitely didn't love everything in this collection--some felt like weird beat literature art experiments--there were many I did enjoy, including the two aforementioned best plays as well as "Icarus's Mother" and "The Unseen Hand." Beyond individual plays, however, I enjoyed Shepard's way with character dialogue, which oscillates between witty banter and heightened emotional confrontation. Fifteen One-Act Plays was an interesting and instructive read even if the plays in question weren't uniformly great.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. Just as mentioned in the introduction, it must not be easy to write one-act plays but Sam Shepard masters the art.
Some stories I appreciated more than others but it’s a matter of taste, not so much about the ability to write captivating stories. Ages of the moon and the monologue of Shakespeare in the alley really moved me.
Sam Shepard is really a good observer, so much at the end I’m just left wondering how it all came to him. Read it in one day but I will probably go back to reading some acts to have a better grasp of the characters psychology.

[Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I usually love Sam Shepard, but these one-acts are all over the place. Some of them are brilliant, some are okay and some well and truly suck. Ironically, there is a forward talking about how hard it can be to write a one-act. I originally thought it was meant as a testimony to Shepard's brilliance as a playwright, but now I'm wondering if it was more meant as a subtle, face-saving apology.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know Shepard has a reputation for great plays, but you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of it in this collection. Most seem like throw-aways and it is surprising that most were staged rather than filmed. Not my cup of coffee.

[Jeff Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Odd, in the way some terrible 70s movies are. But not terrible. Some seem pretty pointless, and just an exercise of writing an avante-garde one-act play, but several were interesting, compelling, thought-provoking.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.75 out of 5.

Repetitive and drawn out. Some of the plays are interesting for a moment and then devolve. Some of them simply read like the work of an angsty college playwright. None of them felt worth it.

Another review suggests these if you’re already a fan of Sam Shepard, that might be the best recommendation and something I wish I had seen before I dove in.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Ages of the Moon” and “The Unseen Hand” are the only ones I care to remember or think about or would want to see produced.

[Enyu Hu · Rating 2 out of 5]

really hit or miss collection. shepard's surreal writing style often loses me