The Rock Garden: A Structural Approach of Postmodernism with Expressionism

Sam Shepard a veteran actor and well-known American playwright has registered a remarkable place in English literature with his more than forty five successful plays including one-act plays, short and full length plays. The Rock Garden is an autobiographical one-act play which is proved to be a milestone of Shepard's repertoire. This play can elaborate his unique style of writing and is a perfect combination of expressionism and transition from modernism to postmodernism. The theme and characters of the play reflects some candid moments which intensify your emotions. You too like Shepard, will contemplate and correlate with the characters. Once in an interview with Pete Hamil, for New York Magazine, he defined his early one-act plays like “explosions that were coming out of some inner turmoil in me. . . ”(qtd. in Creedon, Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance, 1) The play is a conglomeration of different images and their absurd reactions which upraise intrepid voice of inner experiences and develop an insight dwelling in this meaningless lonely environment. In the year 1964, his three plays were staged Cowboys, the Rock Garden, and Up To Thursday. Out of three, he won OBIE Award for the play Cowboys and The Rock Garden in 1964. It is very interesting to know how Shepard blended expressionism with postmodernism in The Rock Garden.