Who wrote this line: "All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities?" Was it Sam Shepard or Spalding Gray? Can you tell?

"Waitresses" might tip you into thinking it was Sam, but the key word is "responsibilities." It transforms the sentence from beauty and bounty into a duty that must be performed. It applies pressure. It suggests anxiety. That’s Spalding all over.

You'd be hard pressed to find two men more different than neurotic New Englander Spalding Gray and cool, laconic, icon-of-the-west Sam Shepard. But as I recently read Gray's journals and Shepard's Cruising Paradise, I was reminded you'd struggle to find two people more similar.

They both moved to downtown NYC in the 60s, without any formal education, to try and find where they belonged in the world, and both ended up Obie winners who reinvented theater by using unconventional structures and staging methods to tell their stories.

They had some surprising stylistic similarities. Their work relies on a certain sense of mania and surrealism. Gray was famous for his one-man monologues, and Shepard's plays often employed monologues to great effect, heightening the familial narcissism and disconnection.

Gray’s monologues were shaped from actual events in his life, and Shepard’s prose, which is much different from his plays - more passive, more sorrowful - is mostly thinly-veiled autobiography.

They both wrestled throughout their lives with alcoholism, commitment and infidelity issues, all of which were rooted in their greatest commonalities: a self-destructive parent who overshadowed their entire adult lives.

Spalding Gray's mother killed herself in 1967 after years of mental illness, which immediately triggered a lifelong obsession with his own death. "I could end my life right now and also end the waiting," he says in a 1969 diary entry.

He once wrote that he feared "mom had not only killed herself, but laid the groundwork to kill me." He begins tackling the subject in the groundbreaking, surrealist Rumstick Road, a play in which he airs tapes of interviews with family members talking about her illness.

These interviews illustrate his mother's isolation. She seemed loved, but not understood; the family was in denial. Gray recounted a time when she was shrieking in the kitchen, “crying out, like she’s being attacked” and no one said a word. “It was like a ghost,” he said.

Sam Shepard's father was a violent alcoholic, and Sam’s fear of turning into his father haunts his work. From Cruising Paradise: "End up smellin' just like your old man. That's the scary part. Start feelin' like yer livin' out some doomed past. Some destiny you've got no say in."

The character who says those lines kills himself shortly thereafter.

Shepard’s dad chose to isolate himself in the deserts of New Mexico, and his work is populated with these stranded men. True West's Lee says, “Do you actually think I chose to live out in the middle a' nowhere? Ya think it's some kinda philosophical decision I took or somethin?"

Here's Travis walking out of the desert in Paris, Texas, which Shepard wrote the screenplay for.

Where Gray’s and Shepherd’s differences emerge is in how they express this determinism. There is a sense of abandonment or emptiness in their work. Shepard "fills that space with violence" (Christopher Bigsby) while Gray is more apt to fill it with anxiety and uncertainty.

Where Sam lashes out, Spalding burrows in. Shepard's plays are darkly Romantic explorations of the mythic while Gray's monologues are precise, personal and philosophical. Gray brings us along as he engages in a self-examination that I can’t see Shepard undergoing, even privately.

One of Spalding's first great roles, before he started his monologues, was as Hoss in Shepard's Tooth of Crime (1972). They didn't know each other well, but Shepard was there for some of the rehearsals.

He also talks about meeting Sam in San Francisco. His precision in describing Sam, which stops just short of derision, is hilarious. I would give anything to read Sam's version of events.

Spalding drowned himself in 2004 while Sam spent years dealing with alcohol addiction (including two DUIs) before succumbing to ALS in 2017.

I was excited to learn that Shepard reads the audio book for Life, Interrupted, Gray's final monologue, but I don’t think it works. Sam’s voice is a campfire – too warm, too gravelly, too all-American for Spalding’s New England accent and NY-style self-absorption and neurosis.

Both sought solace in the landscape. Gray’s compass forever pointed to the ocean, which he grew up near and moved back to in his later years. Sam was all land, though – deserts and road trips, often writing as he drove. I hope death finally allowed them to outrun their demons.

“There is no place where we can arrive. It is all transiency, impermanence and change,” Spalding once wrote in 1999. “When I realized this, I felt the only appropriate thing to do was be in motion, so I got on my bike and rode.”