A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) was created in partnership with Field Day Theatre Company, a renowned
Northern Irish theatre and publishing company from the city of Derry/Londonderry, where Shepard’s longtime
collaborator, the actor Stephen Rea, is the Artistic Director. Particle also reunites Shepard and Rea with director
Nancy Meckler, who directed Rea in Shepard’s Action and Buried Child in England in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Signature is excited to be a part of deepening the trio’s longtime artistic exchange for this important new work.
Shepard began his collaboration with Signature Theatre in 1996 as Signature’s sixth Playwright-in-Residence.
That season saw productions of When the World Was Green (A Chef’s Fable), a collaboration with director Joseph
Chaikin, The Tooth of Crime (Second Dance) (1972), Curse of the Starving Class (1976), and four of Shepard’s earlier
one-acts: Chicago, The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, Killer’s Head, and Action. Shepard
returned to Signature for the 2001-02 Tenth Anniversary Season for the New York premiere of The Late Henry
Moss, and in 2012 helped usher in the first year in The Pershing Square Signature Center with his play Heartless.
Shepard spoke on the phone with Signature’s Associate Artistic Director Beth Whitaker a couple of weeks before
rehearsals about his time in Derry, building a story based on variations, and notions of fate.
Signature: Why did you decide to take on the Oedipus story for your collaboration with Stephen Rea and Field Day?
SS: I’ve been working on the piece for years. Simultaneously, I’ve been working with Stephen on other things, and he had this
company called Field Day, up in Derry, in the north of Ireland, in that little town that had so much duress during the time that
they call “the Troubles.” 1 When Derry became the 2013 UK City of Culture, Field Day was given some money to develop
a project. Stephen asked if I would be interested in doing something, and I said, “Well, I’ve been working on this Oedipus piece
for quite some time,” and I’d give it a whirl. I had a bunch of sketches
that were loosely based on Oedipus, and I was really having
a hard time adapting it, and finally I decided I didn’t
want to adapt it, I just wanted to do variations on the
themes that were in the play. Nancy Meckler, who I’d
worked with years before, became available to
direct the piece, and we all agreed that it would
be this improvisational thing. We started working
on it from that point of view, and lo and
behold it turned into a script.
Signature: Were you thinking about
the history of Northern Ireland as
you were writing it?
SS: It was accidentally
corresponding, you know
the situations
of the
contemporary
characters
are as horrific,
if not more
so, than the
ancient ones.
(left): Sam Shepard, 2012; (below): Debbon Ayre,
Tanya Gingerich, John Diehl, and Bruce MacVittie
in Action at Signature Theatre, 1997.
what I mean? I didn’t push
the theme that way, it just—
it was set up that way.
And set up that way in the
sense that Derry is what it
is. It’s hard to believe that
such horrors happened
in Derry, because when
you walk the streets, the
people are extremely
friendly, and it just
seems like a very
1
A sectarian conflict about
national identity that lasted
from 1969 to 1998 in which
over 3,600 citizens of
Northern Ireland were killed.
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