Sam Shepard, who forged his career at SF’s Magic Theatre, dies at 73

Sam Shepard, the Oscar-nominated actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who premiered many of his works at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, died Thursday at his home in Kentucky.

The cause of death was complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease, his family confirmed. He was 73.

Over a career that lasted more than five decades, Mr. Shepard brought American theater out of the polite parlors of the East Coast and South and into the Wild West.

He first started writing off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway, winning Obie Awards for plays like “La Turista,” “Red Cross” and “The Tooth of Crime” in the 1960s and early 1970s. Many of his most enduring and widely produced plays premiered at the Magic Theatre, where he was playwright in residence for a decade beginning in 1975, including for the writing of three of his quintet of family plays: “Buried Child” (1978), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979, “True West” (1980) and “Fool for Love” (1983), which starred Ed Harris and Kathy Baker.

Cut off geographically and psychically from middle-class norms, his characters forge their own mythos. The American Dream doesn’t figure into their consciousness; if they strive for anything, it’s often to run away from or return to lovers and kin. His men, in particular, are always embarking on sweeping road trips, much like the peripatetic Mr. Shepard himself. (Also like their creator, many of Mr. Shepard’s male characters are scarred by an abusive or absent father.)

You get the sense, though, that it never matters whether his characters are in close physical proximity or far apart. They can’t really hear each other even when they’re right next to each other, everyone stuck in his or her own stunted perspective. Yet futilely assert their realities to one another they must, for kin is all they have; the rest is bare refrigerators, trailers stuffed with magazines. Mr. Shepard’s families are blood tribes. It’s them against the rest of the world — their destinies sealed together by shared secrets and shames, by mysterious supernatural forces that feel as ancient as the land itself.

“Sam Shepard was the defining American dramatist of his generation, theatrically testifying to the nightmare underpinnings of the ‘American Dream,’” writes Larry Eilenberg, longtime professor of theater arts at San Francisco State and the Magic Theatre’s artistic director from 1992-93 and again from 1998-2003.“His best works represent a convergence of (Eugene) O’Neill’s brand of tragic family drama and (Samuel) Beckett’s bleak absurdism, with Sam’s father and the Mojave never far from view.”

Mr. Shepard’s association with the Magic Theatre continued long after his official residency, with 24 productions in total. That included the star-studded world premiere of “The Late Henry Moss” in 2000, which featured Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, as well as the company’s more recent multiyear, multi-company “Sheparding America” project, which, beginning with the playwright’s 70th birthday in 2013, honored his legacy by reviving many of his most beloved plays. Other local theater companies Word for Word, American Conservatory Theater and Crowded Fire also participated.

“A lot of us make theater because of the work that he made, his groundbreaking writing,” said Magic Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco. “It’s not just that he was prolific, but, let’s face it, he wrote across all mediums equally beautifully.” That includes the screenplay for “Paris, Texas,” which won the Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and collections of short stories and poems as well as longer fiction.

“He never stopped,” Greco said. “He started in his teens, and he was writing when I saw him last, in April.”

His career as an actor on stage and screen also spanned decades. With a rangy build and rugged good looks, somehow only enhanced by his very uneven teeth, Mr. Shepard was a natural in macho Hollywood roles that were much like the cowboys and drifters he created in his plays. He received an Oscar nomination for his performance as Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff,” also giving memorable performances in “Days of Heaven,” “Baby Boom,” “Steel Magnolias,” “The Pelican Brief” and “Black Hawk Down,” among more than 40 other roles.

“He’s such a great looking guy, and he held himself so well,” Harris, who also starred in “The Right Stuff,” said by phone. He had most recently worked with Mr. Shepard on a production of “Buried Child” in London this winter. As an actor, Harris said, Mr. Shepard was “always very centered. He has such a low tolerance for bull—.”

Mr. Shepard often directed his own work or consulted on notable productions of it, and his actors describe a similar hewing to the essentials. Local actor Will Marchetti, who played the Old Man in the Magic’s world premiere of “Fool for Love,” remembers Mr. Shepard as “a man of few words.”

“I was a little intimidated by him, by his silence really,” Marchetti said by phone. That silence was much more likely to break over Tequila at Tosca’s in North Beach than in the rehearsal room. “I realized early in the game that questions weren’t permitted.” Without having to say so, Marchetti said, Mr. Shepard clearly felt that “if you don’t get it right at the start, something’s really wrong. You’ve got to understand what I wrote. I’m not here to answer questions.”

Luckily, Marchetti says, “the play kind of directed itself.”

But if Mr. Shepard was old-school in his macho reticence, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t generous to his artists. Local actor Rod Gnapp remembers Mr. Shepard greeting him backstage after the first time he went on as an understudy in the world premiere of “The Late Henry Moss.” “Sam met me in the dressing room with a shot of bourbon and just a big smile and a hug,” Gnapp recalled by phone.

As a director, Mr. Shepard hailed from an earlier time. Gnapp said Mr. Shepard used phrases like “make it organic” or “just do what you feel,” in contrast to many other directors’ more “marionnette kind of approach.” Gnapp said that although Mr. Shepard was “very attentive to every period and comma,” he’d also say things like, “Let’s just get up and move around and pretend we’re animals,” frequently punctuating his speech with hippie phrases like, “Cool, man.”

His plays were full of vivid, even grotesque images. Mr. Shepard’s language, said Harris, “is extraordinary. Especially having just done ‘Buried Child’ in London, one of the things you realize is that there’s just no end to exploring this stuff. It’s like a bottomless pit, playing these characters that he’s created.”

“His theatrical monologues — arias really — brim with the spirit of American tall tales, of Pecos Bill and Calamity Jane, and the oversized lies we tell to sustain us,” said Eilenberg.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of his imagery comes from the end of “Curse of the Starving Class,” when Wesley and his mother, Ella, remember a tale their patriarch used to tell, about an eagle capturing and flying off with a cat:

“Ella: ...They fight like crazy in the middle of the sky. That cat’s tearing his chest out, and the eagle’s trying to drop him, but the cat won’t let go because he knows if he falls he’ll die.

“Wesley: And the eagle’s being torn apart in midair. The eagle’s trying to free himself from the cat, and the cat won’t let go.

“Ella: And they come crashing down to the earth. Both of them come crashing down. Like one whole thing.”

Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Ill., to a mother who was a teacher and a father who was a pilot in World War II, a Fulbright Scholar and an abusive alcoholic.

He was married once, to actor O-Lan Jones, from 1969 to 1984, and with whom he had a son, Jesse Mojo Shepard.

He moved in with actor Jessica Lange in 1983, having two children with her: Hannah Jane Shepard and Samuel Walker Shepard. Their relationship lasted until 2009. He is survived by his three children and by his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.

The family is planning a private funeral. The Magic Theatre will host a Bay Area celebration of Mr. Shepard’s life and work in September; more details to come.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Evan Sernoffsky and Leba Hertz and wire services contributed to this report.

Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @LilyJaniak