[Note: The author wrote the following about Sam Shepard’s 1970 play Shaved Splits for his book Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard, but it wasn’t included in the final version (his decision). Gary Amdahl is publishing it here because he’d expressed enthusiasm for the play. End of story.]
On the saucily draped wings of the popular sex revue Oh, Calcutta!, a Broadway box-office triumph in June of 1969, a second bawdy hit called The Dirtiest Show in Town from the celebrated Off-Off-Broadway theater and café in Manhattan’s East Village, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, transferred that same month to a larger Off-Broadway venue, the Astor Place Theatre. So it was that the twenty-six-year-old dramatist Sam Shepard resolved to present New York’s theater world with a pornographic show on sex and violence from his own fractured sensibility.[1] Eventually titled Shaved Splits, Shepard’s one-act spectacle opened, for a limited engagement of four back-to-back midnight performances, at La MaMa on July 27, 1970.[2]
Shepard’s best man for his wedding the previous fall, Bill Hart, directed the show, and the set’s seedy atmospherics were brought to pulsating life by underground lighting impresario Johnny Dodd, while La MaMa’s sound guy David Altman orchestrated Shepard and Hart’s innovative use of the P.A. system. Madeleine le Roux, the show’s leading man Lee Kissman’s girlfriend (then performing in The Dirtiest Show in Town), played the sultry sex-starved housewife Miss Cherry opposite Kissman’s Geez—a rabid member of the radical anarchist collective Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (named for a line from Amiri Baraka’s 1965 poem of militant Black resistance, “Black People!”). The Taiwanese actor, director, and playwright Ching Yeh, who’d created the part of the Opium Smoker in the downtown underground classic The Hawk and had produced his own play, Wanton Soup, at La MaMa the previous October, was cast as Cherry’s obsequious manservant, Wong. The Asian man offers a haven of spiritual peace amid an otherwise tawdry swirl of exploitation, innuendo, gun violence, and generalized chaos.[3]
Shaved Splits opens with Cherry, played by le Roux, languorously sprawled in her slip on an enormous “pink fuzzy womb” of a bed. She’s in her own brain, attempting arousal with a pornographic book while le Roux’s recorded voice reads the material over the P.A.: “His mighty cock glistened in the half white light of the moon. It seemed to stand on its own, as though miraculously separated from the man, the boy. The lips of Cherry’s moist cunt throbbed with the anticipation of its entry….” This porn is supplied to her by an illicit book dealer named Chunky Puke (Daniel Landau), who arrives with dozens more lurid titles—“Horny in Vietnam,” “Dagos in Drag,” “Cheeseburger Hard On,” “Plastic Orgiastic,” “The Visit of the Moist Wet Terror,” “What Ringo Starr Won’t Tell His Mother,” “Funky Faggot,” “Hippie Harlots,” and so on. She eagerly appraises each book and reads the titles aloud, while in a sight gag, Chunky Puke produces from within a hidden hole in the bed’s mattress far more volumes than his satchel could realistically hold. “Not bad,” Cherry says after reading out the last title. “I’ll take ‘em all.”[4]
Rioting can be heard on the street below. Soon, an armed fugitive named Geez invades Cherry’s sexed-up sanctuary to commandeer it as a redoubt for firing at the police, who order him to surrender through a bullhorn. Geez has freed Cherry’s domestics from servitude, but Wong doesn’t want to go. Instead, he performs a Chinese song and dance amid the pandemonium, as Geez admiringly (and absurdly) reflects upon the singularly meaningful qualities of Chinese theater: “Wong’s really got some beautiful timing, you know. To think he wasted all that serving you….[Chinese] theatre’s pretty boss, too. Every gesture means something, every sound. They tell a whole story with song. Sort of like opera but heavier.”[5]
The same way the Hopi Indian choreographer Louis Mofsie advised Shepard on Hopi music and dance for Operation Sidewinder, Ching Yeh supplied his original music for the dance and choreographed it himself to faithfully reproduce Chinese theater’s principle of precise body movement. Years later, he explained the distinction between Chinese and American theater to the New York Times’ journalist Kim Yen: “Most prominent,” Yen reported, as if reading from Geez’s incongruous lines about Chinese theater in Shaved Splits, “is the use of hand and facial gestures to communicate moods or actions, while economizing on spoken language.”[6]
The servile Wong says little other than “yes, Miss Cherry,” “no, Miss Cherry,” and remains ominously silent through his dance. Near the end, he climbs onto the windowsill and hurls himself out into the night, as death is, presumably, a more desirable fate for Wong than enduring the American-borne horrors taking place around him. After his body hits the ground, the roaring on the street goes silent, and Geez observes simply, “The war’s over.”[7]
Geez’s voice comes over the P.A. system in the final sequence with a long monologue, or “aria” as Shepard’s consciousness-exploding monologues became popularly known. In the aria, the formerly berserk dissident describes hearing a band play hits from earlier times and brings to mind the future scene of synchronic Black musical history in the 2025 film Sinners: “Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Rolling Stones, Fats Domino. All combined. All the bands of the fifties and sixties combined in one band and all making sense.” He follows the sound into a bar and sees the band performing “Satisfaction.” He picks up a bright orange guitar and starts playing along, though he’d never learned the instrument. “The music filled him up and poured out over the dusty tables and chairs. He was alive again. The war was over and he was alive!”[8]
Tracking a critical reception trail for this fly-by-night production can be difficult. Nevertheless, Arthur Sainer’s rave Village Voice review opens with a machinegun spray of descriptors to blaze the brush away: “frantic, wondrous, surly, delicious, expansive, cryptic, blatant, elegiac, fatiguing, corrupting, virginal, metaphorical, literal, stupefying, messy, giggly, two-dimensional, corrosive, counter-erotic, spaced out, rhetorical, convulsive, metallic, grubby, pricky, convivial, gyrational, overheated, popeyed, flat-eyed, wide-eyed, and funky.”[9] Similarly terse about the play, Michael Townshend Smith, the playwright, critic, and longtime lover of Johnny Dodd’s, applied a few less choice words: “wretched….deliberately vulgar, trash.”[10] The Los Angeles Times’ Ray Loyn, for its West Coast premiere in 1989, called the play “nasty as a whiplash,” and the Scotsman, after its opening at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1998, saw Shaved Splits as a “cheeky little firebomb of a play,” but with a tacit complexity beneath its filth.[11]
Albert Poland, the legendary Off-Broadway producer, hoped to move Shaved Splits to a larger venue, but Shepard mulishly refused. He didn’t want his work to be considered “tissue paper” (a reference to New York Times critic Clive Barnes’ comment that Shepard’s plays were disposable like Kleenex).[12] Later, after a rejection from Esquire for the script’s “obscene” language, Shepard found a less abashed publisher with Screw: The Sex Review, who eagerly accepted it for their June 21, 1971, issue, with fantagraphic illustrations contributed by artist David A. Johnson. The tabloid’s editors, or more likely Shepard, announced Shaved Splits as “an imaginative excursion to the far frontiers of American consciousness and beyond, a representation of contemporary feelings and attitudes that tell us more about what it’s like to be alive today than all the platitudes and middle-brow theorizing of the mass media put together.”[13]
Shaved Splits was included in Shepard’s collection, The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (1972 only), but has only been produced a few times since.[14] This is too bad, as the work speaks as ferociously to the insanity of our own era as it does the tumult of the 1960s: it’s an allegory of capitalism as pornography, politics as violence, and dissent as art—“an allegory,” a Scotsman noted at Edinburgh nearly thirty years ago, “of an America that’s just about to crash and burn.”[15]
Robert M. Dowling is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University and the author of the recent biography of Sam Shepard, Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard (Scribner Publishers, 2025), and the critically acclaimed Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts (Yale University Press, 2014; finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2015).
[1] British critic Kenneth Tynan’s revue Oh, Calcutta! was directed by Shepard’s frequent director from the Open Theater, Jacques Levy, and boasted contributions by Shepard (scene three from 1964’s The Rock Garden), Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, and Jules Feiffer, among other literary luminaries.
[2] There is an arcane basket-weaving term “shaved splits,” but the play’s leading man Lee Kissman affirmed that the title simply means “a bald pussy.” Author interview with Lee Kissman, 4 March 2023.
[3] Dates for Shaved Splits are listed in the La MaMa program in the La MaMa archives and the timing works with the Village Voice review. These contradict the only book it was published in, The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), which has it playing the weekend before, as other sources do after that. The program also specifies that it was David Altman on sound, but the book says Charles Mingus III.
[4] Sam Shepard, Shaved Splits, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York: Urizen Books, 1981), 167, 164, 172–73, 173: 167, 164, 172-3, 173.
[5] Shepard, Shaved Splits, 167, 164, 172–73, 173: 186.
[6] Kim Lem, “East Meets West on Stage,” New York Times, January 4, 1976, 86.
[7] Shepard, Shaved Splits, 198.
[8] Shepard, Shaved Splits, 199-200.
[9] Arthur Sainer, “Pink Bedrooms & Oscar Wilder,” Village Voice, August 6, 1970, 37, 40: 37.
[10] Michael Townshend Smith, Johnny! (Silverton, OR: Fast Books, 2011), 75; author interview with Michael Smith, 4 April 2022.
[11] Joyce McMillan, “Theatre Review: Shaved Splits,” The Scotsman, August 11, 1998.
[12] Author interview with Albert Poland, October 8, 2023.
[13] Sam Shepard, “Shaved Splits,” Screw: The Sex Review, 21 June 1971, 3-7, 16: 3. Fantagraphic: Of or pertaining to the kind of comic book illustrations the publishers at Fantagraphics might accept for their list.
[14] Shaved Splits, by Sam Shepard, directed by James Terry, performed by 976-Players, Al’s Bar, Los Angeles, CA, January 5, 1989; Shaved Splits, by Sam Shepard, directed by Jeff Zinn, performed by Pontoon Productions, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 11, 1998; Shaved Splits, by Sam Shepard, Michael Chekhov Theatre Company, Big Little Theatre, New York, opened September 24, 2006.
[15] Robert Gore-Langton, “Drama: Shaved Splits at the Assembly Rooms,” The Express [Scotland], November 8, 1998.