Kicking a Dead Horse

There was a review on Tuesday in the New York Times about a new Sam Shepard play called "Kicking a Dead Horse." As the review notes the play opens with a startling image: that of a life-size dead horse lying on its back with all four feet in the air, next to a hole that is presumably his grave. We see shovelfuls of dirt emerge from the depths of the hole long before we see the main character crawl out of the hole and explain how all this came to be.

Apparently the main character, one Hobart Struther, had been on his way "out West" to reclaim the cowboy in his soul when his horse literally dropped dead. The rest of the play deals with his attempts to bury the majestic beast and becomes a symbolic diatribe for what is wrong with our country and our souls: in a nutshell, we have paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

Now I haven't seen the play so I can't comment on it or the review (which wasn't so great), but I do find it amazingly interesting that the play write chose to symbolize the destruction of the last frontier with a dead horse. To be fair, Shepard is known for his love of "the Wild West" so it makes sense for him to sound the death knoll for all that he holds dear (in the words of the reviewer "America's lost ideals and despoiled frontiers"), with a potent symbol of romantic freedom.

And how effective that symbol is in both its simplicity and grandeur. A dead horse dwarfs the cowboy-wanna be and it may only be because it is lying on its back that we can actually see just how large the animal actually is. That such large creatures are in many ways dependent on smaller ones to sustain them is but one of the many ironies in Shepard's message. Look how the mighty have fallen and look even closer to see if we humans are large enough to take their places.

One thing I can comment on is the image of the horse as a symbol of freedom, which is why it is so horrific that they are still being slaughtered for food. Horsepower literally built this nation and I believe it is our obligation to repay the debt and at the very least take care of those who we have tamed.

The review does not give away the ending of the play but hints that Shepard's vision is not as bleak as it first appears. "The horse is dead, true, but maybe, there's some life left in him [the cowboy] yet." Let's hope that there are enough of us with life left in us to sustain the magnificent beasts that took us into uncharted territories. What we did with them was not their fault.