True Dylan is a one-act play based on an actual, somewhat “dramatized” interview that the playwright Sam Shepard conducted with his friend and fellow musician Bob Dylan for Esquire Magazine in 1987. It focuses mainly on Dylan’s early days in New York, his meeting with Woody Guthrie, what constitutes ‘truth’, the greatness of James Dean, his musical influences and his motorcycle crash.

Interviews with Bob Dylan generally have a tendency to drift into the absurd with the journalists exasperated and enervated beyond reason. Although Sam Shepard is a trusted friend and sometime song collaborator, he too finds himself in a somewhat surreal situation not dissimilar to the meandering dialogues of Estragon and Vladimir in Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT.

Throughout the play, SAM is taping the interview on a small recorder. But whenever he plays the tape back, he hears only a Jimmy Yancey piano solo. Eventually, some of the spoken words come back, but the music of Jimmy Yancey permeates and punctuates the short play, with the tune being one that BOB claims he heard from no known source at the onset of the scene.

From the very beginning, even before his career began, Dylan has been very protective and secretive about the details of his private life. Beginning with actually rechristening himself and inventing the hobo persona of a troubled youth who spent his formative years running away from home, in orphanages, traveling with carnivals and working for circuses, riding the rails all over the American Western and Southern states, assimilating blues, country and folk music on the road before eventually arriving in New York City.

Dylan invented himself from scratch and is an invention of his own fertile imagination. Even, or especially, Bob Dylan’s long anticipated “autobiography” – CHRONICALS – is not an entirely reliable source of information, as his “novelistic writing” contains an equal amount of “facts” as “poetic license” and is generally considered an entertaining “work of literature”.

Because Sam Shepard was not merely a muckraking reporter, he did have special access and insight into Bob Dylan’s personality, asking just the right questions and thus making this Esquire Magazine interview more informative than usual but he never the less states this about Dylan - “Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not to the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.” “Some myths are poisonous to believe in, but others have the capacity for changing something inside us, even if it’s only for a minute or two. Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us. The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us.”

Featuring Mehrdad Afzali & Bardia Khajenoori
Host - Derrick Jenkins
Directed by Charles C. Urban
Assitant Director - Enel Kerler
Costumes by Enel Kerler


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