Sam Shepard Saw It All Coming

The family battles he described foreshadowed our current national crisis.

- Graeme Wood

LAST AUGUST, THE ACTOR Randy Quaid tweeted a photo of himself, stripped to his bike shorts and pretending to be passed out next to a body of water, probably in his adopted home state of Vermont. Quaid had not worked regularly since an apparent psychotic break in 2010, when he announced, looking agitated at a press conference in Vancouver, that a conspiracy of assassins called the “Star Whackers” intended to murder him and his wife, Evi. (He said the Star Whackers had already killed David Carradine and Heath Ledger, disguising Carradine’s death as autoerotic asphyxia and Ledger’s as an accidental overdose.) The Quaids then spent years in Canada seeking refuge from these imagined stalkers and their partners in the United States government. But now, in the photo, Randy looked to be in a state of enviable bucolic calm, like a bear snoring after a salmon lunch. Next to him was a computer tablet, a big knife, a bottle of Perrier, and—splayed out on the sun-warmed stone, like Quaid himself— a copy of Seven Plays, by Sam Shepard. The book appeared to be open to True West, the play in which he and his real-life younger brother, Dennis, starred as the quarreling brothers Lee and Austin off-Broadway 35 years ago.