But Shepard plays are back in season, and they are neither antiquarian nor regional. They are modern—even visionary—and disturbingly universal. The best of the plays have all enjoyed revivals, most prominently a Broadway production of True West that ran through March of this year, with Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano in the roles of Lee and Austin. The plays’ dominant notes are now darkly political. Critics have always thought of the family strife in Shepard’s dramas as representing deeper American strife. But now it’s clear that the nerves Shepard vivisected for five decades are precisely the ones that the past several years of political dysfunction have exposed: red America and blue, blended into a violent purple; the failure of the fortunate to respect the wretched; the consequences when the wretched seek their reckoning. Quaid’s life went the way of a Shepard script a decade ago, transforming into a self-devouring, hallucinatory version of itself. He was just a few years ahead of us.

For someone who became typecast as the “strong, silent type” (many of his obituaries succumb to that cliché, or strain to avoid it), Shepard produced a huge number of words, starting with a series of experimental plays in the 1960s New York theater scene. His dramatic work reached maturity in the late 1970s with Curse of the Starving Class (which recently finished an off-Broadway run), the Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, and True West. He kept a journal while touring with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and in 1986, he co-wrote the song “Brownsville Girl.” At 11 minutes, it is either one of Dylan’s longest songs or Shepard’s shortest play. Sample lyric: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” Dylan, he later wrote, was chronicling “the whacked out corridors / of broken-off America.” Shepard devoted most of his life to a similar project: a never-ending tour of the American interior. Many of his settings are rural, remote, and ungoverned places whose inhabitants are sometimes left alone to stagger down paths to self-annihilation.

Anyone who has driven off the interstate through Nevada or Texas knows these places. Shepard kept returning there, to the troubled backwaters that in the past four years nearly everyone on the coasts has come to call, patronizingly, forgotten America. Pull over between towns, or sometimes even into one, and only the coyotes can hear you scream. In a 2009 short story, a Shepard-like narrator overhears cable news on in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Indiana, and complains that a Wolf Blitzer clone is

parading back and forth in front of a huge electronic map of the United States, magically touching it and brushing it in different areas, causing it to light up red in the South, blue in the North, giving the impression that the whole damn country is a cartoon show, divided up like apple pie, and no one actually lives here.

If Shepard’s characters at all resemble the people who live in these places, the American interior is troubled indeed. Starting with his appearance in The Right Stuff, in 1983, Shepard’s most famous characters began bifurcating, into the ones in his plays and the ones he played as an actor in Hollywood films. The characters in the plays exist to be unraveled and undone, usually by forces at first invisible and, by the final act, inevitable. But his best-known movie roles show us Shepard as an American hero: Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, Diane Keaton’s amused country boyfriend in Baby Boom (1987), General William F. Garrison in Black Hawk Down (2001).