The following as an excerpt of an interview of Sam Shepard by Don Shewey published in The Village Voice, November 12, 2004

Every time a president named Bush invades Iraq, Sam Shepard writes a play in response. The first one wasn’t exactly a tragedy- the playwright called his 1991 States of Shock “a vaudeville nightmare”- but when history repeated itself, he was determined to approach it the second time as farce.

“I really wanted to write a black farce,” says Shepard, “so I went back and studied Joe Orton.  Nobody wrote better farce than him, and he was very dark.  Not being as witty and clever as Joe Orton, I used Entertaining Mr. Sloane as a jumping-off place.  I started with three characters, the couple, and the stranger who comes to stay with him.  The notion of somebody coming out of nowhere and disturbing the peace. It fit perfectly with the Republican invasion. The whole storm that built up after 9-11.  The WELCH character came in last.  I wanted him to be like something out of Brecht’s clown plays.”

Shepard’s working title for the God of Hell was Pax Americana, an ironic hint at the play’s theme of toxic patriotism. The use of flags in the play is a typically Shepardian theatrical device, this proliferation of objects is both comic and creepy, like the artichokes in Curse of the Starving Class, the corn in Buried Child, and the toasters in True West.  But it also unmistakably refers to the blanketing of red-white-and-blue that turned the country’s outpouring of post-9-11 grief into something bullying and coercive.

“We’re being sold a brand news idea of patriotism,” Shepard says darkly. “It never occurred to me that patriotism had to be advertised.  Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn’t have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker.  That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all.”

What is that show-your-colors-mentality about?  “Fear,” he says. “The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

Wary of being drawn into a political discussion, Shepard insists, “I don’t want the play to become a spokesman for a point of view. I really want the play to speak for itself.”