Shepard and his family returned to the United States in 1974, “to find our roots,” and set up their home in the first of a series of locations in the San Francisco Bay area. Inevitably, the move further disrupted his attempts to find his feet again as a writer, and there was more than one false start. California Heart Attack (1974) remained unfinished, an exercise in the same writer-and-wife-lost-in-hostile-environment vein as Blue Bitch, but transplanted across two continents. Man Fly (1975) was a somewhat uninspired adaptation of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus which was turned down by the theatre that commissioned it, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. However, from 1976, having oriented himself in his new location, Shepard settled into one of the most prolific phases of his career, and over the next three years or so produced a remarkably diverse range of work, from essentially light-hearted projects like the satirical comic-operetta The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife (written for America's bicentennial celebrations in 1976), to the Pulitzer prize–winning play Buried Child (1978).

Unquestionably the most important catalyst to Shepard's fresh output was his new association with the Magic Theatre. Founded by John Lion in 1967, this small, adventurous outfit had acquired a reputation for challenging audiences with plays by writers from Ionesco to Shepard himself (the Magic's 1969 production of La Turista was the first outside New York).