Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews June 12, 2023 June 5, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
Sam Shepard was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on November 5, 1943. His father served in the Air Force as a fighter pilot in World War II and then retired to a farm in Duarte, California where Shepard was raised. As a youth, Shepard was often troubled by his heavy-drinking father. Sam Shepard studied agriculture for a year at San Antonio Junior College and then left to join a touring company of actors. In 1963 he moved to New York City where he served tables at the Village Gate, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where legendary jazz performers played. Within a year, Shepard had several of his plays produced in Off-Off Broadway theaters. Fatefully, Shepard began his work in the theater in New York City during the birth of the Off-Off Broadway movement. His work was made at experimental avant-garde venues such as Caffà Cino, the Open Theatre, the American Place Theatre and La Mama. Young talent like Shepard dared to shock and surprise audiences with avant-garde, daring, and groundbreaking work on next to nothing budgets. Shepard's early influences include rock and roll, jazz and popular culture. At a time when lowbrow and highbrow art were less and less clearly defined, Shepard deftly incorporated non-literary influences like radio, movies, advertising and rock and roll in his unconventional plays. Less than four years after arriving in New York, Shepard's plays won the Village Voice newspaper's OBIE awards for his plays Chicago,Red Cross, and Icarus's Mother.
From the beginning of his writing career, Shepard's work reveals he is more interested in consciousness than in reality. His plays are landscapes of emotions that contain states of mind inside the self. More than typical dramatic action or the typical character and story arc of a traditional play, Shepard's plays like Fool for Love resemble the surreal and often absurd and contradictory realm of dreams or the subconscious. His characters such as the ones in Fool for Love have no tragic flaw or fateful quest. They sort through the emotional tumult of their lives in a power struggle where identity is vague, time is cyclical, and the past haunts the present. As in a dream, memories are often idealized and altered to suit the needs of the dreamer.
Shepard's work seems to run parallel with is own journey to come to terms with his identity. He has been attributed as saying, "I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could almost play anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the character." So different and yet sharing attributes with his father, Shepard's life has been one of creating and playing roles. Newsweek once featured Shepard on the cover with the title, "Leading Man, Playwright, Maverick." After 1985, Shepard starred in over fifteen feature films while staging only two new plays. Shepard's career in acting has often overshadowed his enormous influence on theater. This Hollywood star status heightened with his relationship to Oscar-winning actress, Jessica Lange.
Shepard wrote Fool for Love shortly after breaking up with his wife O-Lan to be with Jessica Lange. In a letter to his friend and virtuoso collaborator, Joe Chaikin, Shepard described his play, Fool for Love as "the outcome of all this tumultuous feeling I've been going through this past year it's a very emotional play and in some ways embarrassing for me to witness but somehow necessary at the same time." Few writers manage to elevate higher than the sensationalism of confessional drama, but Shepard's allegory for his own loss and love rises above and provides us with an intensely powerful personal drama that draws us in with its manic depiction of ill-fated love.
Please wait while we process your payment