Sam Shepard’s life unfolds like a play in four acts: a California boyhood under wide skies; the restless, electric rise in New York as an Obie-winning playwright; a New Mexico chapter marked by family, film, and the sharpening of his craft; and finally, Kentucky pastures where horses and mortality kept steady company with an enduring screen presence.
These stages do not contain the whole of Shepard, but they sketch the outlines of his restless spirit—always searching, always shifting, yet carrying with him the same questions that haunted his characters.
The Los Angeles Times once dubbed him the “cowboy playwright,” though the label is more myth than truth. Only two of his works carry “cowboy” in their titles—Cowboy Mouth and Cowboy #2. The cowboy lived mostly in Shepard’s image, not his scripts.
Sam Shepard
| Wikipedia
Cowboy Mouth at the New Mexico Actor’s Lab
Cowboy Mouth was born not on desert soil but in a cramped room of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Written with Patti Smith, his lover and collaborator, it is less a western and more a fever dream: rock-and-roll prayer, surreal confession, and theatrical dare all at once. The play premiered in Scotland in 1971 and later in America, with Shepard and Smith themselves embodying Slim and Cavale—two lovers bound in chaos, both aspiring musicians, both half-animal, half-angel.
Original US production of Cowboy Mouth starring Sam Shepard and Patti Smith/ http://www.sam-shepard.com/cowboymouth.html
New Mexico Actor’s Lab has now carried this volatile work onto a Santa Fe stage, folding Shepard’s New York origins back into his New Mexico legacy.
Directed by Zoe Lesser, the staging was spare—bed, drums, guitar, television—yet rich with shadows and suggestion. It opened in silhouette and closed in darkness, as though the play itself had slipped into memory. James Alexander Reid (Slim) and Anna Jastrzembski (Cavale) gave the language its jagged poetry, rendering a relationship at once intimate, destructive, and mythic. Rod Harrison’s Lobster Man emerged like a figure from a dream, absurd and haunting.
The lines sting with their honesty. “You cheated, you lied, you said that you loved me,” Slim spits. Cavale answers in desperation: “I’m still packing this pistol. I’m still the criminal…It means I’m desperate.”
Cowboy Mouth set 1 | Brian Nixon
In Cavale, we glimpse Patti Smith before she became Patti Smith—the crow-like cowgirl, the punk prophetess in the making. In her memoir Just Kids, Smith recalled: “The characters were ourselves, and we encoded our love, imagination, and indiscretions in Cowboy Mouth.” Shepard, through Slim, voices the other side of their unraveling: “What am I doing here? I don’t know who I am anymore…Why are we so unhappy?”
The play pulses with themes that would follow Shepard throughout his career—suicide, addiction, the ache of faith, the pull of family, the hunger for recognition. Cavale names the religion of her generation:
“Rock ’n roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations. We created rock ’n roll from our own image, it’s our child.”
Even its title bears rock-and-roll blood, lifted from Bob Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Within a few years, both Shepard and Smith would join Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, turning the mythic road itself into theater.
Near the play’s end, Cavale speaks words that sound like Shepard’s own confession: “People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth.”
Cowboy Mouth set 2 | Brian Nixon
Cowboy Mouth is not tidy theater—it is a scream, a prayer, a love song, and a wound. To watch it is to remember that saints and sinners alike pace the motel rooms of the imagination, desperate to be heard.
The production continues through September 28 at New Mexico Actor’s Lab in Santa Fe.
Brian C. Nixon, Ph.D., is Chief Academic Officer and professor at Veritas International University in Albuquerque. As a writer, musician, and artist, his interests surround the philosophical transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. You can contact Brian via his Bandcamp email address: https://briancharlesnixon.bandcamp.com
