Shepard had remarked as early as 1980, “You can't keep writing about the family for the rest of your life,” and by the mid-'80s it seemed that particular furrow had been plowed as far as it could go. Just as La Turista and The Tooth of Crime had rounded off earlier periods of Shepard's work, so A Lie of the Mind effectively summarized his phase of family plays, concluding almost ten years of thematic and stylistic development since Curse of the Starving Class. Although Far North briefly reprised the chorus in filmic form, it felt like an epilogue rather than a new beginning, and seemed to beg the question of where Shepard was to go next. Moreover, whatever pressure he was placing on himself to find new directions must have been greatly exacerbated by the weight of expectation being loaded on him by an arts press which had in the mid-'80s hailed this multi-award-winning writer-director-movie-star as a “Renaissance Man” and “New American Hero.” Shepard responded by virtually dropping out of sight for several years, and his new work since then has been greeted, inevitably enough, by the kind of critical backlash all too frequently aimed at those who have failed to live up to the hype.

It took a full-scale Broadway revival of Buried Child in 1996 to get him back in the good books: any real American dramatist, it seems, should naturally be aspiring to put family dramas on Broadway (this was the first time a Shepard play had ever appeared in this arena).