Tonight a Bag Lady is in the Audience

There’s no room for self-indulgence in theater; you have to be thinking about the audience. Joe Chaikin helped me understand this. He used to have this rehearsal exercise in which the actors were supposed to play a scene for some imaginary figure in the audience. He would say, Tonight Prince Charles is in the audience. Play the scene for him. Or, Tonight a bag lady is in the audience.

Is it true that you wrote Simpatico in a truck?

SHEPARD

Well, I started it in a truck. I don’t like flying very much, so I tend to drive a lot, and I’ve always wanted to find a way to write while I’m on the open road. I wrote on the steering wheel.

INTERVIEWER

Really? What highway were you on?

SHEPARD

40 West, the straightest one. I was going to Los Angeles. I think I wrote twenty-five pages by the time I got there, which was about five hundred miles of driving. There were these two characters I’d been thinking about for quite a while, and when I got to L.A. it seemed like I had a one-act play. Then another character popped up; suddenly there were two acts. And out of that second act, a third. It took me a year to finish it.

INTERVIEWER

How do you decide that a play is finished?

SHEPARD

The only way to test it is with actors, because that’s who you’re writing for. When I have a piece of writing that I think might be ready, I test it with actors, and then I see if it’s what I imagined it to be. The best actors show you the flaws in the writing. They come to a certain place and there’s nothing there, or they read a line and say, OK, now what? That kind of questioning is more valuable than anything. They don’t have to say anything. With the very best actors I can see it in the way they’re preceding. Sometimes I instinctively know that this little part at the end of scene two, act one is not quite there, but I say to myself, Maybe we’ll get away with it. A good actor won’t let me. Not that he says, Hey, I can’t do this; I just see that he’s stumbling. And then I have to face up to the problem.

- Sam Shepard, Paris Review