Sam Shepard’s Angel City: The Broken Vision

Abstract

Sam Shepard’s, Angel City represents a culmination of the first decade of his work. The play bears the unmistakable stamp of Shepard, the avant-gardist with its surrealistic dream structure and its creative transformations of character. It exhibits Shepard’s bizarre sense of humour with its satanic attack on Hollywood. Shepard’s America emerges largely as a land of failed promise and lost attachment. It is an economic jungle thriving on exploitation and excess profit. The American dream for success has lost its contact with the mythic past in which purity of self, cleanliness of life and dignified manners are upheld. The absence of the country’s myth and the loss of certainty have been described in the plays of Shepard as the root causes of all misfortunes and disappointments.