Nearly all great American plays are about families. The comedies, like You Can't Take It with You, celebrate the ability of disparate relatives to unify against the outside world. The tragedies, like A Long Day's Journey into Night, mourn the often unbridgeable chasm between intimacy and true affection. Sam Shepard, the most protean of active American playwrights, has written about revolution and land reform and organized crime and the decline of the West (in both the Spenglerian and the John Wayne senses), but his laconic truisms sound most universal when he focuses on the tightly confined agonies of blood kin. He...
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