“Buried Child” (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and remains Mr. Shepard’s best-known work. It arrived on Broadway in 1996 and has been revived many times since — the most recent staging, by the New Group Off Broadway in 2016, starred Ed Harris. Richard Eder reviewed the premiere, at the small Theater for the New City downtown:

Sam Shepard does not merely denounce chaos and anomie in American life, he mourns over them. His corrosive images and scenes of absurdity never soften to concede the presence of a lament, but it is there all the same. Denunciation that has no pity in it is pamphleteering at best and a striking of fashionable attitudes at worst, and it is fairly common on the contemporary stage. Mr. Shepard is an uncommon playwright and uncommonly gifted and he does not take denouncing for granted. He wrestles with it at the risk of being thrown.

Mr. Harris also starred in the New York premiere of “Fool for Love,” in 1983. Here is what Frank Rich had to say:

It could be argued, perhaps, that both the glory and failing of Mr. Shepard’s art is its extraordinary afterlife: His works often play more feverishly in the mind after they’re over than they do while they’re before us in the theater. But that’s the way he is, and who would or could change him?

Ben Brantley reviewed Mr. Shepard’s latest play, “A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations),” in 2014:

Mr. Shepard is (I think) trying to get at the ways we all are all haunted by the primal myths that run through our civilizations. Think of this fixation, if you wish, as a sort of cultural original sin. And no matter how “advanced” our scientific and intellectual investigations and theorizing, those myths retain a hold on us that can never be erased or even clinically assessed.

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