Broadway babies

Actor/director Gary Sinise is already at his desk in an actors' rehearsal space on 42nd Street when I arrive early one morning to interview him and Sam Shepard. Muscular, of medium height, the forty-one-year-old Sinise is friendly, relaxed, as alert as a fox. Shepard comes in a few minutes later, smoking, looking for coffee. At fifty-two, he's as lean and leathery as he seemed in Days of Heaven (1978) and The Right Stuff (1983). He thinks we may have met before; we haven't, but maybe he caught me in his peripheral vision when we sat opposite each other several breakfasts running, without speaking, at the Claimjumper Hotel in Park City, Utah, during the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. I think I was probably right in believing he isn't the sort of guy who'd want a journalist's blandishments served up with his bacon and eggs. Here, in New York, he proves to be less laconic than I'd expected, though the words he wastes in an hour still wouldn't make a haiku.

We are meeting to talk about the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's production of Shepard's 1979 play Buried Child, which has reached Broadway, having been successfully directed by Sinise, a co-founder of the company, at its home base in Chicago last fall. Funny as evocations of quiet despair go, the play is one of Shepard's haunting investigations of a family ripped apart by sexual betrayal and then asked to relive its trauma when someone, in this case a runaway grandson, returns from out of the past. As such, it's a reminder that Shepard is closer to late-period Ibsen than any contemporary American playwright.

It's a fertile period for Shepard. Last month, Alfred A. Knopf published Cruising Paradise, his latest collection of tales, diary entries, and dialogues, which, no less than its predecessor, Motel Chronicles (1982), constitutes a sad, skeptical, yet stirring paean to an America unable to reconcile its myths with its realities. In July, a new Shepard play, When the World Was Green, co-written with Joseph Chaikin, will open in Atlanta as part of the Olympics Arts Festival. This fall, Sinise, who played the amputee Vietnam vet in Forrest Gump (1994) and astronaut Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13 (1995), can he seen as a cop in the Ron Howard kidnapping thriller Ransom.

GRAHAM FULLER: Gary, tell me about Steppenwolf's relationship with Sam's plays.

GARY SINISE: [laughs] It's a kind of symbiotic madness. The first play of Sam's I did [as an actor] was Curse of the Starving Class [1976], and it was actually not at Steppenwolf, it was in Los Angeles [in 1979]. I just fell in love with it. Then, in 1981, I ended up directing Action [1974] at Steppenwolf. After that we did True West [1980], A Lie of the Mind [1985], Fool for Love [1983], and Curse of the Starving Class. Sam and I have similar backgrounds. We both began working in very tight groups of folks that came together out of -

SAM SHEPARD: Necessity.

GS: Year. We had peers to suffer with. Sam started at Theatre Genesis in St. Marks Church [in New York City's East Village]. Steppenwolf began in a little basement. We were trying to develop an uninhibited approach to theater, and the actors in Steppenwolf found a great wealth of style in Sam's plays.

GF: Have you worked together before?

SS: No. This is the first time.

GS: We started talking about Buried Child a couple of years ago, and Sam intimated there'd just be a couple of cuts. [laughs] And then the first night I sat down with him, his whole script was marked up in red.

GF: Buried Child is seventeen years old, Sam. How has your relationship to it changed?

SS: When that much time elapses, you can't help but look at it as though it were written by a different person. I see it in a perspective I never saw before.

GF: What about It has changed?

SS: My perspective. That's all. Not the play.

GF: Did it belong, thematically, to that group of plays you began writing in the mid '70s? [SS nods] There's an intimation of incest in it, which immediately made me think of Fool for Love.

SS: For some reason, I was on a family rush at that time. I'd been skirting around this family thing before in one-act plays, particularly Rock Garden [1964], in which you can see the underpinnings of Curse of the Starving Class. I finally plunged in with Curse, Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love.

GF: Why the preoccupation with family?

SS: I don't know. There was no big motivation. You keep looking for things in the wrong places and then suddenly you see them right in front of you. I suppose you have to go through a lot of stuff to realize they're right in your living room.

GS: When you came to New York and started writing, was there something you were trying to escape?

SS: Oh, yeah.

GF: Betrayal within a family seems to he a theme you return to constantly.

SS: True. What's the question? [laughs]

GF: Well, why is betrayal so central to your work?

SS: I feel it's in my bones somehow. It's something that has not only affected me personally, being raised up in this country, but that is in the whole fabric of the culture. I can't put my finger on it and I don't have the cure for it and I would never pretend to. It certainly feels, as time goes by, that there is a very mysterious betrayal of some kind that we don't understand. We keep paying for it and paying for it and we don't know why we're paying for it. There's all kinds of sociological bullshit you can explain it away with - genocide, for example - but we can't seem to come to terms with it as Americans. We don't seem to be able to face what has actually become of us.