Buried Child
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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.
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[edit] Plot Summary
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, a grandson none of them 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 the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy, and suggests the perhaps slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin. '
[edit] Performance History
Buried Child premiered at The Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1978, directed by Robert Woodruff. Its New York premier was at Theater for the New City in New York City on October 19, 1978 [1]. 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.[citation needed]
[edit] 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
Vince - A hip young jazz enthusiast, claiming to be Tilden's son
Shelley - His attractive but ditsy girlfriend
Father Dewis - The local minister who enjoys drinking sessions with Halie
[edit] Text edition
- Sam Shepard, Buried Child, New York: Dramatist's Play Service, 1997, ISBN 0-8222-1511-X
