In october 1964, a double bill of Sam Shepard's first two plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, opened at Theatre Genesis, a small Off-Off-Broadway venue based at St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie, a church in Manhattan's East Village. The string of short, one-act pieces which followed in the period up to March 1967 (when his first two-act play, La Turista, opened) make up a fairly distinct grouping within the overall development of Shepard's work. Although they represent his writing at its most embryonic and unrefined, they are worth examining in some detail because they form the foundation of all the work that followed, in their exploration of the potential of theatrical language and their use of simple but striking stage imagery. There is also a raw dynamism about these plays which demands attention: as the earliest and purest expression of Shepard's concern with mining subconscious impulses, they create an immediate impression of unresolved emotional tension, combining an exhilarating, free-form playfulness with an acute sense of underlying anxiety. This anxiety is particularly bound up with the questions of identity and self-definition which have continued to haunt his work ever since. The writing style and, indeed, the influences which feed it place these plays firmly in the modernist tradition, but one can also see in them some of the tensions which later precipitated significant shifts in Shepard's approach.