La Turista was first produced at the American Place Theatre in New York in 1967 and published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1968. It was Shepard’s first full-length play (his earlier works were one-acts) and announced — to an audience that included the major New York critics — a theatrical sensibility unlike anything in American drama: hallucinatory, violent, funny, and completely indifferent to the conventions of psychological realism.
The title refers both to “the tourist” (the American abroad) and to “la turista” (Mexican slang for the intestinal illness that afflicts travelers). In Act One, Kent and Salem are Americans in a Mexican hotel room — Kent is desperately sick, vomiting, sunburned, while Salem sprawls on the bed reading magazines. A Mexican boy (the Son) appears; a “doctor” arrives who may not be a doctor. The scene escalates into violence and hallucination.
In Act Two, the setting mirrors the first: an American hotel room. Kent is sick again — but differently (the illness is now psychological rather than physical). A “doctor” appears (different from the first). The scene again escalates — culminating in Kent’s escape through the back wall of the theater in a spectacular physical stunt (Shepard specified that the actor must actually crash through scenery).
The play’s method is transformation: characters, settings, and situations shift without explanation. Kent is simultaneously a tourist, a cowboy, a criminal, a patient, a fugitive. The dialogue moves between naturalistic conversation, monologue, incantation, and the language of dreams. Shepard was twenty-three when he wrote it, living in the East Village, seeing everything (the Living Theatre, LSD, rock and roll, the Beats) and synthesizing it into a theatrical form that owed nothing to Miller, Williams, or Albee.
Collecting La Turista
First edition (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $10–$20
Shepard’s first published play and a landmark of American experimental theater. Scarce in fine condition with intact jacket.