Snake Oil

The U.S. may be the only country in which a would-be revolutionary carries a bomb in one pocket and a credit card in the other. This schizophrenia increasingly infests the theater. Typically, Sam Shepard's play Operation Sidewinder deplores the mechanization and dehumanization of U.S. life, and yet the show owes the little vitality it has to mechanical props, and the electric guitars and drum-blistering fervor of a folk-rock group known as the Holy Modal Rounders.

The finest prop is a super-rattler of a snake with blinking red eyes. It is actually a super-computer fashioned by the usual mad German emigre scientist; the beast has escaped from an Air Force base in the desert country of the Hopi Indians. The unprogrammed reptile goes human with a lubricous vengeance and rapes a dumb but comely blonde tourist (Barbara eda-Young). After that, the plot metastasizes. There are Black Panthers (Warner Brothers film gangsters in blackface) driving a real Black Convertible, heroin addicts, Air Force and CIA mental retards and Broadway Indians doing a Broadway Snake Dance.

By the time the show ends in a lurid atomic holocaust, it has depicted the trite declension of American life in three tenses: Past Dream, Present Nightmare, Future Oblivion. Shepard is 26, and pathetically certain that he is the first man since Adam to bite into evil.

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