Sam Shepard
We mourn the passing of legenday writer and actor Sam Shepard. Grad Acting began the class of 2017’s final season with Shepard’s Buried Child.
“Buried Child was arguably the last great American play written before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. There was much nostalgic rhetoric in the air when he was running for office, rejecting any notion that America’s best days were receding into the horizon. In many ways, Shepard’s play was one of the first dramas to reveal the decaying forces in the American landscape, forces that, it could be argued, were released, completely unregulated, by the Reagan era. As a bracing reminder of where our country and its values are, and how they are exhumed, no matter how often they are buried." — Laurence Maslon, Associate Chair