In New York in the '60s, Shepard lived with the son of the great jazz bassist, Charlie Mingus Jr., who had also grown up in Duarte. "He never stopped writing," Mingus said of the times when Shepard wasn't reading Beckett, Pirandello, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter. Shepard "would walk into a room and close the door, with the clacking of the typewriter and all. Then he would come out with a play in a box that the paper came in, a ream of paper."

Dennis Ludlow, who helped build horse fences and a barn on Shepard's small Northern Californian ranch during the '70s (and who played supporting roles in Magic Theatre productions of "Buried Child" and "Fool for Love"), tells me his most indelible memory of Shepard is of the restless playwright writing in a pocket-size notebook. "He was always writing down what he heard in bars, stores, everywhere," says Ludlow. Later, one of Shepard's playwriting classes presented him with a carton of the tiny writing pads.

Still, Shepard's early plays were scintillating rock riffs without accessible verses and choruses until he met New York director and acting teacher Joseph Chaikin. He "had a tremendous influence on Shepard," writes Shewey. "The values he espoused -- his steadfast faith in the priority of art over glamour, show business, wealth, and fame" -- left a lasting impression. Shepard told the Paris Review that Chaikin helped him understand there's "no room for self-indulgence in theater; you have to be thinking about the audience."

Under Chaikin's counsel, Shepard began doing something he had never dreamed of before: rewriting. "Joe was so persistent about finding the essence of something," says Shepard. "He'd say, 'Does this mean what we're trying to make it mean? Can it be constructed some other way?' That fascinated me, because my tendency was to jam, like it was jazz or something. Thelonious Monk style."

Chaikin's influence blossomed in Shepard at about the same time the playwright was tiring of his ragged band of pop culture outlaws: drugstore cowboys and gunslinger rock stars, bluesy swamp rats and speed-freak gamblers. In the mid-'70s, after living for a year in London, Shepard settled in countrified Marin County, Calif., with his wife O-Lan, an actress, and young son Jesse. They shared a house with O-Lan's mother, Scarlett, and Scarlett's husband, photographer and writer Johnny Dark. With Magic Theatre actors and directors, writers and musicians coming and going, Shepard felt at home in this "very strong community of artists," he tells me. "It was energetic and intense in a way that I had missed from New York. I don't think I've really come across that situation again. There was something really great about the Magic experience."

At home on fertile new artistic ground, and committed to a new seriousness in his writing, Shepard stopped heeding every impetuous urge and began listening to voices arising from a deep and wide rift in his heart -- the emotional space surrounding his family, "particularly around my old man," he says. "I was a little afraid of it, a lot of that emotional territory. I didn't really want to tiptoe in there. And then I thought, well, maybe I better."

Of course, Shepard didn't exactly tiptoe in there. As everyone knows who has seen his trilogy of family plays -- "Curse of the Starving Class," "Buried Child" and "True West," which he wrote in a creative burst of three years -- Shepard ripped the door off the hinges, smashed the toasters and exposed an incredible torment at the core of postwar American families. Sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, aunts and uncles -- all were splintered by a never-ending race for never enough money, by base sex and ambition, by inevitably mounting layers of frustration. At least that's how it felt as we sat, awestruck, in the theater.

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