For the first time in his considerable achievements, Shepard has taken up the subject of a gender conflict. Usually his plays represented masculine experience, butthis time the protagonists are stuck in the clutches of conflicting mutual feelings. Creating a harmonious life is doomed to failure, and the symmetry of antagonistic emotions underlines their fruitlessness.  Is it possible to embed such issues more dramatically than in an incestuous relationship?

Sam Shepard (1943-2017) is one of the most important American playwrights of the second half of the 20th century. 

Author of over 50 plays, director, actor. He wrote, among others, “The Tooth of Crime,” “Geography of a Horse Dreamer,” “True West,” and “Fool for Love.” 

He also wrote screenplays for such films as "Zabriskie Point" (directed by M. Antonioni) or Paris, Texas (directed by Wim Wenders).

Shepard's plays aren't literature on stage – they are theatre. It is characterised by an excellent sense of literary material, a radical departure from the assumption that art is supposed to explain something ("it limits and reduces the load of the word"). The characters' actions and situations are the basic tools for narration. Shepard is keen to move away from a clear separation between fantasy and realism, allowing the course of events to lead to an astonishing entanglement of reality - "Like in real life, you simply don't know what's really going on" and what is an illusion of our senses, a game of intelligence. Shepard explores a paradoxical metaphor of our reality: on the one hand, the need for individuality and being an individual, on the other, the need for belonging and collective identity.The stage space is more psychological than physical, so it is pointless to ask where the events take place. Shepard's protagonists realise that their life's odyssey is not a journey ahead, but a journey into the depths. This journey does not bring definite solutions, clear conclusions, and although cognitively dubious, it is inevitable; one moment or another of our lives we must take it.