Buried Child

Infobox Play
name = Buried Child


image_size =
caption =
writer = Sam Shepard
characters = Bradley
Dodge
Tilden
Father
Dewis
Shelly
Halie
Vince
setting = a farm house in Illinois, 1978
premiere = 27 June 1978
place = Magic Theatre
San Francisco, California
orig_lang = English
subject =
genre = Drama
web =
ibdb_id = 2296

"Buried Child" is a play by Sam Shepard that won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and launched Shepard to national fame as a playwright.

Plot Summary

;Characters
* Dodge - an elderly alcoholic with a quick wit
* Halie - his sanctimonious yet feisty wife
* Tilden - their slow-witted but good-natured eldest son
* Bradley - Tilden's younger brother, a mean-spirited bully with only one leg
* Vince - a hip young jazz enthusiast, claiming to be Tilden's son
* Shelley - his attractive but ditzy girlfriend
* Father Dewis - the local minister who enjoys drinking sessions with Halie

The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting, alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, claiming to be Tilden's son (whom none recognizes or remembers), and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbors a dark secret: years earlier, Dodge had buried an unwanted newborn baby (a sibling of Tilden and Bradley) in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. The act purges the family, at last, of its infamy, and suggests the slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin.

Performance History

"Buried Child" premiered at The Magic Theatre in San Francisco on 27 June 1978, directed by Robert Woodruff. Its New York premier was at Theater for the New City in New York City on October 19, 1978. [cite news | author=Richard Eder | title=Reviewed: Buried Child | url=http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=FC77E7DF1738E632F25754C0A9679D946990D6CF | work=The New York Times | date=1978-11-07 | accessdate=2008-08-02] Theatre critic Harold Clurman wrote, in The Nation, "What strikes the ear and eye is comic, occasionally hilarious behavior and speech at which one laughs while remaining slightly puzzled and dismayed (if not resentful), and perhaps indefinably saddened. Yet there is a swing to it all, a vagrant freedom, a tattered song." It transferred to Theatre de Lys, now the Lucille Lortel Theatre, where it became the first Off-Off Broadway play to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

The show was revived for a two month run on Broadway in 1996 following a production at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. The production, directed by Gary Sinise at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, was nominated for five Tony Awards but did not win any. The script for the production had been reworked by Shepard, allegedly fixing edits that a previous director had made to the text without Shepard's authorization.Fact|date=May 2008

References

Further reading

*

External links

*
*