“The evolution of an artist is a movement towards clarity.” This quote from the abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko appears in Shepard's notes for August 1979, and in many ways epitomizes the shift of emphasis in his work which began with the play he was then preparing to write, True West, which premiered at the Magic Theatre in 1980. In that piece and the one that followed, Fool for Love (Magic Theatre, 1983), the grotesque collision of realism with cartoon characters, gothic weirdness, and extravagant theatricality which had marked his previous family plays all but disappeared. Such deliberately jarring effects made way for what, on the surface at least, appears to be a consistently maintained use of realistic illusion. Both these plays, for example, eschew their predecessors' bizarre, minimalistic staging in favor of detailed box sets, reproductions of recognizable real-world environments. Shepard even specified in the stage directions for True West that “no attempt should be made to distort dimensions, shapes, objects or colors,” or otherwise graft on a “stylistic concept.” The only overtly nonrealistic device in either play is the presence of the Old Man in Fool for Love, observing the action from a platform outside the proscenium frame. Even this, however, was a late addition to that play's development, and all other characterizations in these pieces adhere – at least on the surface – to more orthodox conventions.