Inquiries and Challenges of Current Politics on the Contemporary American Stage: Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse and David Mamet’s November

This paper centers on two plays written and presented for the first time at the end of the George W. Bush eight-year presidency and which, to a great extent, constitute inventive responses to this particular era and its political climate that pervaded not only the US but the entire world. While differing markedly from each other, not merely in style and tone but more importantly in their respective scopes, their aims and targets, Sam Shepard’s Kicking a Dead Horse, a dark monologic parable—often received as a sharp tirade against America’s present state—and David Mamet’s November, a seemingly light-hearted satire—conceived by its author as a love-letter to his country— invite a comparative reading. Both plays offer not just a profitable insight into the limitations and restrictions of the contemporary American stage once it is faced with the challenge of accommodating the political, but also an engaging view into what remains exceptional and inexhaustible about its reserves whenever it strives to grapple with the present moment when the line between what is cast as anti-American and what is not proves more difficult to be clearly drawn than ever before.