‘Stalking’ Reveals Some of Shepard’s Buried Life Story

Speeding through the night, a driver studies his reflection in the windshield, watching it transform into his father’s face, then his grandfather’s, and “clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized.”

As related by one of the characters in Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Buried Child,” this experience reminds us that each life is a composite of all the familial, social and world history that has preceded it. Performed by Ethan Hawke, this excerpt is among the interviews, archival material and production clips in the documentary “Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself,” airing tonight on KCET.

Though the 54-year-old writer-actor jealously guards his privacy, he chose a number of self-revelatory pieces to read last month at the Geffen Playhouse (several of which are featured in the documentary, as well). He opens up still further for director Oren Jacoby and producer Sarah Teale.

Shepard speaks of his fascination with “this balance between aloneness and being a part of a community.” He talks about leaving America for England during the Vietnam War, but returning because “I belong here. It made me understand the nature of being tied to a culture--that you can’t get out of it.”

Perhaps most tellingly, he reveals: “I was born into this strange family of cranky men . . . totally insane, I mean, nuts.” Looking back on his youth (some of which was spent in Duarte), he recalls the private hell into which his father descended, taking the family with him. The pain was so great that Shepard didn’t, at first, want to deal with family issues in his writing. “I didn’t really want to tiptoe in there, and then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’d better.’ ” The result was some of his most powerful work, including “Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child” and “True West.”

“If you don’t honor your ancestors . . . you’re committing a kind of suicide,” he says.

Other than a film clip of his Chuck Yeager role in “The Right Stuff,” the documentary shortchanges the past two decades of Shepard’s career. But it explains as much as it can about this enigmatic writer’s rough-and-tumble language and his desolate, disquietingly familiar imagery. After all, as La Mama founder Ellen Stewart--an early Shepard backer during the exuberantly experimental ‘60s in New York’s Greenwich Village--says in archival footage: “The audience transcends itself, [but] has no idea why.”

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* “Sam Shepard: Stalking Himself” airs at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28. PBS has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for younger children). The 1984 “American Playhouse” version of “True West,” starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise, will follow at 9 p.m. It has been rated TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).