Review: Buried Child by Southwestern University
by Michael Meigs

Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right."  

At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's horrible world without a trace of mockery. We are obliged to take seriously this collection of incomprehensibly distorted and injured individuals, and the result approaches the seriousness and purpose of classical tragedy.

This ample but claustrophobic farmhouse exists in an undefined locale, in a state of malaise. Ill, coughing, and stationary on the sofa is Dodge, a foul-tempered old man who swills whiskey on the sly; his wife Halie is at first unseen, heard from upstairs in a long, self-preoccupied nagging litany. Two grown sons eventually appear. Tilden, a raw stunned man in a glistening yellow rainslicker and mud-caked boots; and later, Bradley, a one-legged brute and coward who regularly sneaks into the house at night to give his sleeping father Dodge haircuts with the brutality of a sheep-shearer. Halie leaves in the first act to call on clergyman Father Dewis and in Act Three, the next day, returns with Dewis in tow, chatting with unseemly familiarity and bearing a bouquet of yellow roses.

 Stumbling into this foul nest in Act Two are Vince and Shelly. They are driving to New Mexico, stopping so Vince can visit Grandpa Dodge. Vince has no idea that his father Tilden has returned home from some unexplained catastrophe in New Mexico. Shelly, a vivacious young woman who is Vince's not very closely attached girlfriend, is along for the ride and she becomes the object of nasty, frustrated desire for each of the maimed males in the household.

With hints, blurted stories and an eventual grisly revelation the action is shaped to reveal a family secret, a crime carried out twenty-six years earlier that has possessed and deformed these individuals. That story, as grim as it is, is secondary to the spiritual devastation affecting everyone in the piece except Shelly.

Life has stopped and withered inside this house. In the first act Tilden comes in from the rain bearing an armload of corn. He insists that he has just picked it outside, while Dodge vehemently denies that any corn has been planted for the last twenty-six years. Tilden later comes in with an armload of carrots -- with the same story. And there's the bouquet of yellow roses in the final act, which becomes an incumbrance for the confused, well-meaning Father Derwis and eventually serves as an incongruously cheerful funeral wreath.

There's much more going on within, between and among these characters. Shephard builds a structure of menace, raising tensions and lowering them in a game that keeps us uneasy and yet attracted by the unspoken promise of a resolution. Something terrible is going to happen and despite ourselves, we want to know what it will be.

Evan Faram as the ailing Dodge and Jessica Hughes as Halie do not resort to exaggerated gesture or makeup to portray characters who are probably in their 60s. Faram is angry and pathetic together, the shell of a man, consistent in his self-centric, grasping struggle against everyone and against life itself. Hughes plays the upright but unrighteous Halie with ranting rigidity. Zachary Carr is rangy, closed-in and mutely defensive as Tilden. Although he does in fact bear a physical resemblance to Vince, he refuses to acknowledge the relationship.

Bradley, initially imposing, turns coward when his mother returns. Matthew Harper is convincing on both ends of that spectrum. In similar fashion, Tyler King takes Vince the visitor from earnest puppy on arrival to stupidly ravening pit bull at the finale.

Leslie Fray as Shelly is attractive, at home in her character, and the only one here not trapped in the past. Father Dewis (Edward Coles) would like to be helpful, but as the revelations roll, he makes his own confession. "I am afraid this is not my domain."

While creating these grotesques, this cast and director show an acute awareness of the importance of pacing, visible thought and reaction. In this manner they create whole characters and visible emotion, maintaining audience engagement in situations that otherwise might seem so incredible and farcical as to provoke alienated laughter.

 

The scenes ending acts one and two offer the examples, in each case deliberately paced and charged with meaning. Tilden decides to cover his sleeping father with corn husks, an action he carries out with great concentration. The moment between Bradley and Shelly that ends Act Two is so charged with sexual tension that it seems to last forever.

Caricatures come alive in this play and urge us to think about guilt, sterility, and a home drenched with homelessness. The sins of the father blight the prospects of children and following generations. Dodge deserves his misery -- all the more because it is self-induced and self-perpetuating. We are ready to escape that house, like Shelly. But like her, we pause on the way out and cast a glimpse back at the enigmas.

 EXTRA -- 

Click for program of Buried Child 

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Buried Child
by Sam Shepard
Southwestern University