Abstract

Theater

In Philip Rahv's famous classification, palefaces are writers from the United States who cultivate sensibility, refinement, education and discipline, Henry James for instance. Red-skins are the half baked mystics, primitives, the gross naturalists, writers whose strength is experience and energy. The division between these types is deep. Rahv published this theory in 1939 and wondered whether someday the paleface-redskin split would heal over, perhaps when the country was more mature. But who in the age of John Updike and Sam Shepard will say that it has? He has developed several theatrical innovations, though the word "developed" may be too strong, since Shepard seems to have entered the theatrical avant-garde with the ease of a man entering his own living room. The gap between the best work of a redskin writer and the worst is therefore almost always immense.