SPLIT CHARACTER: A STUDY OF SELECTED PLAYS OF SAM SHEPARD AND ADRIENNE KENNEDY

Abstract

Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy are avant-garde e <perimentalists for whom the concept of dramatic character does not exist in any conventional serse. Shepard, particularly in his early plays of the 1960s, adopts a concept of character as collage. His unique use of character transformation and role reversal, where a single character •Jrojects various alter egos, attests to his brilliance as an innovative experimentalist. These tran ;formations resemble collage or jazz improvisation in which both the singer and the music can he anything, and the character is "a fractured whole with bits and pieces flying off the central theme."1 Character, for Shepard, is what the actor does at a specific present moment regardle ;s of the given circumstances of the play's action.

In his early plays, Shepard adopts a model of charar:ter as performance, a model that undermines the conventional concept of character as a waole, consistent, and integrated entity. Shepard's characters are performers and role-players wlco lack essence and who have "several selves which are continually changing."2 Shepard stat< s that he preferred "a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could play anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the character." 3

Like Shepard's, Kennedy's characters are split personalities, and this division results from the characters' inability to resolve the problematic issres of race, gender, and class.