Sam Shepard.

Sam Shepard (b. 5 November 1943) may have been the most accomplished and talented dramatist to emerge from the off-off-Broadway scene of the 1960s. He hit his stride, however, in the 1970s, with a loose tetralogy of plays — Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) — that studied the family and the tortured relationships between American fathers and sons, also a theme of plays by Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night) and Arthur Miller (All My Sons and Death of a Salesman).

Shepard has continued to produce plays to the present day, finding in the Irish actor Stephen Rea a particularly fruitful collaborator. Though he rarely gives interviews, Shepard discussed his early career and the barriers that kept him from writing about his father in Stalking Himself, a 1998 documentary about the playwright directed by Oren Jacoby for the PBS Great Performances series. In the below video, Shepard talks about his early career and the decisions that led him to write about his family; there are excerpts from The Tooth of Crime (1972), The Unseen Hand (1969) and Curse of the Starving Class: