Geography of a Horse Dreamer by Sam Shepard

First published: 1974

First produced: 1974, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

Type of plot: Suspense

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: England

Principal Characters:

• Cody, a clairvoyant
• Santee, and
• Beaujo, small-time criminals
• Fingers, their boss, a gambler
• The Doctor, his lieutenant

The Play

Geography of a Horse Dreamer begins in darkness. The audience hears the sound of galloping horses, at first faint, then growing stronger. A slow-motion color film of a horse race, gradually brought into focus, is projected on the rear wall; as the picture sharpens, the sound becomes louder. There is a yell, the film stops, and the lights come up, revealing a run-down hotel room. Against the rear wall, Cody, dressed in jeans and a cowboy shirt and wearing dark glasses, lies on his back in a bed, handcuffed to the bedposts; it was he who yelled. Santee, in dark coat and gangster-style hat, sits in a chair perusing the Racing Form, a pistol in his lap. Beaujo, wearing a wrinkled pinstriped suit from the 1940’s, practices pool shots on the floor, equipped with a cue and three balls. By their dress and manner, Santee and Beaujo appear to be gangsters.

Cody is gifted with a peculiar form of precognition. In his dreams he is able to “see” horse races before they actually happen; in his trancelike state he is the first to speak, calling out the results of a race in the manner of a trackside announcer. Later the audience learns that Cody was kidnapped by gamblers from his native Wyoming some time before the action of the play begins, and that for a while he was able to predict a steady succession of winners. By the time the play starts, however, he is mired in a long losing streak.

The first act, “The Slump,” is animated by a conflict between Cody’s keepers. Santee, who blames Cody for their fallen fortunes, has no sympathy for Cody’s pleas to be released from his handcuffs; he fears that Cody will try to escape, as he almost did once before, thereby depriving his abductors of their gold mine. Santee regards Cody as a dream machine, mocking his requests for time off by calling him “Mr. Artistic,” “Mr. Sensitive.” This resentment increases when the boss, Fingers, hands down orders (by means of an offstage telephone call) that Cody must start dreaming dog races instead of horse races—an order that Santee regards as the ultimate humiliation. Beaujo, on the other hand, is inclined to listen sympathetically to Cody’s requests, even if he is afraid to grant them. Cody vainly pleads, for example, to be allowed to play his record: “It’s a source of inspiration, Beaujo.”

Above all, Cody insists that he needs to know where he is if he is to create the imaginative space needed for his dreaming. During this slump, his dreams have been dominated by the “Great Nature” and Great Plains of his native Wyoming. At Fingers’s orders, Cody has been kept isolated, ignorant of his surroundings; he does not even know in what country he is. The turning point of the first act occurs when Beaujo gives him a few clues as to their location. Not long afterward, Cody’s gift returns, and the first act concludes with the voice-over of an announcer calling an actual race that vindicates Cody’s prediction.

Act 2, “The Hump,” opens in darkness with another film clip, this time of a dog race. Again, the lights come up as Cody yells, revealing a fancy hotel room with the furniture arranged as it was in the first act. The characters are dressed as they were before, but their clothes are neat and new. Cody is back to picking winners, now dogs, and Santee and Beaujo’s fortunes have risen with his. The strain of the dreaming is telling on Cody, however: He speaks with a slight Irish accent and talks to imaginary puppies as he leads them through a training routine.

The three of them are visited by Fingers and his lieutenant, the Doctor, complete with black bag. The ominous aspect of Fingers, the unseen boss of the first act, is undercut by the figure that appears onstage: Fingers is “tall, thin, and rather effete,” according to the stage directions, and he affects a ludicrously poetic idiom: Upon seeing Cody, he exclaims, “I should have known he’d have the look of eagles,” and he characterizes the momentous meeting as that of “the tail and head of a great dragon.” Clearly, he wants others to regard him as a sensitive, cultivated, perhaps artistic fellow. The Doctor—who, Shepard stipulates, should look like the rotund “heavy” Sydney Greenstreet—is a caricature of the bad scientist. Ruthless, diabolical, he obviously has the upper hand.

Like the first act, act 2 turns on a conflict between two of Cody’s keepers; here, the Doctor and Fingers. When Fingers becomes aware of Cody’s disturbed condition, he announces that he will personally escort the dreamer back to Wyoming and seems to relish the prospect of returning to the great West as much as Cody did in act 1. The Doctor, who has been staring at a television with the sound turned down, responds with a blood-curdling yell and throws Fingers across the room; Cody yelps like a wounded animal. The Doctor tells Santee to fetch his bag.

Some of the dreamer’s power, the Doctor explains to Santee and Beaujo, accumulates in a bone in the back of the neck. He has in his bag a collection of such bones, the efficacy of which can be restored by the addition of a fresh bone from the right dreamer. With Santee’s help, the Doctor is just slicing into Cody’s neck with his scalpel when the playwright’s deus ex machina comes to the rescue in the form of Cody’s strapping cowboy brothers, Jasper and Jason, never so much as mentioned before their dramatic entrance. They kill the Doctor and Santee and the hapless Beaujo with their shotgun blasts. After they leave with Cody, a waiter (summoned earlier) enters to discover the carnage. At Fingers’s request, the waiter puts Cody’s mysterious record on the turntable. Here the stage directions specify a particular track from a particular recording by the Zydeco artist Clifton Chenier. With that, the play ends, and “the music continues as the audience leaves.”

Dramatic Devices

Geography of a Horse Dreamer directs the playgoer’s attention to the interior experience of the artist through a variety of dramatic devices that invite metaphoric as well as literal interpretation by the audience. At the beginning of the play, for example, the film clip of the horse race is Cody’s dream, which becomes evident to the audience as soon as Cody yells, the film goes off, and the lights onstage “bang up.” Having established a connection between Cody’s mind, on one hand, and the “external” stage setting (and the characters that populate that setting), on the other, Shepard has linked the play’s “geography” with that of the artist’s mind—both Cody the dreamer’s and Shepard the playwright’s.

This correlation is immediately sustained and strengthened by the focus of the first act’s dialogue—Cody’s need to know where he is and his keepers’ refusal to inform him—undergirded by metaphors of place that objectify the artist’s interior experience: Cody says that he needs a “better situation,” that Fingers does not understand “the area I have to dream in,” that Fingers fails to consider his “position.” Beaujo, after hinting where they are, fears that he has “overstepped his bounds” and later accounts for his sympathetic treatment of Cody: “I keep putting myself in his place.” The Doctor notes that “the territory [Cody] travels in” allows him to live “in several worlds at the same time.” The pervasiveness of this imagery makes it difficult to overlook, but at the same time it is never heavy-handed: Shepard’s procedure is to use idiomatic metaphors that custom has robbed of their force and take them literally, without detracting from the drama’s realism. It is customary, for example, to speak of poetic “inspiration”—that is, a kind of spirit possession. Shepard revives this dead metaphor in the second act: As Cody’s gift returns, the stage directions specify, he “talks with another voice; slightly Irish, as though he’s been inhabited by a spirit.”

The geography motif repeats itself in the play’s symmetrical structure: Each act mirrors the other, down to the film openings, stage settings, and costuming. There is only one significant difference: In the second act, the furnishings are luxurious and the clothes are new. As a result, the second act seems to occur in the same “place” as the first act, and in fact it does, both metaphorically (in the dreamer’s mind) and, from the playwright’s perspective, literally (on the stage). The exact geographical location of the events remains as much a mystery to the audience as it is to Cody, and is correspondingly insignificant.

Equally effective is Shepard’s oblique humor: Just as he objectifies the metaphors of place, so he takes the artist’s plight so literally that potential tragedy is undercut by comedy. “Taking literally” is one of comedy’s most reliable devices. The whole conception of Cody-the-artist is so literal that it is comic. Here the nature of theater as performance is vital. Thematically, the opening tableau shows the powerless artist as a victim. As a theater image, however—Cody handcuffed to the bed in a cruciform position—it is comically exaggerated. This tension between theme and image, which runs throughout Geography of a Horse Dreamer, keeps the audience entertained. Without it, the play would be an exercise in self-absorbed didacticism.

Critical Context

Geography of a Horse Dreamer is one of many plays in which Shepard makes use of the conventions of genre fiction and their cinematic counterparts. In Geography of a Horse Dreamer the plot and the characters are largely drawn from the crime thriller, while the climactic rescue of Cody is straight from the Western. The Tooth of Crime (pr. 1972, pb. 1974), Shepard’s first play to receive major critical acclaim, is a verbal duel between an aging rock star and his challenger; this tour de force incorporates many elements of the classic Western showdown, but it also features a futuristic setting and other trappings of science fiction. An earlier play, The Unseen Hand (pr., pb. 1969), brings together an improbably named alien, Willie, and the outlaw Morphan brothers, resurrected from the Old West’s Jameses and Daltons. In Back Bog Beast Bait (pr., pb. 1971), a pair of bounty hunters tangle with the occult, another of Shepard’s favorite sources for motifs. Suicide in B Flat (pr. 1976, pb. 1979) could be described as an off-the-rails police procedural that draws on occult or horror fiction and the espionage genre.

Shepard’s use of these popular genres is distinctive and many-sided. They provide a loose structure that permits him to pursue dreamlike associations without lapsing into incoherence. Often, as in Geography of a Horse Dreamer, they create a mood of humorous incongruity, evidence that the playwright does not take himself too seriously. Suicide in B Flat, for example, is, like Geography of a Horse Dreamer, a play about a tortured artist; it is also very amusing. These conventions serve Shepard and his audience as a common language; they are the stuff of his homemade American mythology, the equivalent of the classical myths and stories that sustained centuries of European drama. What is most impressive, however, is the brazen assurance of Shepard’s raids on popular art. Rarely does he restrict himself in a given play to borrowing from a single genre; he often combines elements from wildly disparate sources (science fiction and the Western, for example) with an imaginative exuberance that belies the generally grim messages of his plays.

In his work since the late 1970’s, Shepard has taken a new direction. In plays such as Buried Child (pr. 1978, pb. 1979), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize, True West (pr. 1980, pb. 1981), Fool for Love (pr., pb. 1983), and A Lie of the Mind (pr. 1985, pb. 1986), he has explored the dynamics of family life: the grotesque but unavoidable spiritual deformations, but also the redeeming power of love. Some critics have applauded this shift toward domestic realism, seeing it as evidence of a maturing engagement with perennial human concerns; others see a loss of the qualities that made his earlier work so memorable. There is general agreement, however, that Shepard—who is a much-praised actor, screenwriter, and film director as well—is one of the leading playwrights of his generation.

Sources for Further Study

Bigsby, C. W. E. “Sam Shepard.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Brustein, Robert. “The Shepard Enigma.” The New Republic 194 (January 27, 1986): 25-28.

DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Herman, William. “Geography of a Play Dreamer: Sam Shepard.” In Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.

King, Kimball. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988.

Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1981.

Sessums, Kevin. “Sam Shepard: Geography of a Horse Dreamer.” Interview 18 (September, 1988): 70-79.

Wilcox, Leonard. Rereading Shepard. Basingstoke, England: MacMillan, 1993.