Odd, but whereas the dread and loathing of A Delicate Balance (which also won the Pulitzer Prize at its premiere) makes me shrug my shoulders and wonder whether its meaninglessness is worth the effort, Buried Child, Sam Shepard’s 1979 essay on familial rot, tickles my funnybone and keeps me engrossed up to the final, famous image.
Certainly, the opening is a litmus test for an audience’s reaction, as ornery, decrepit papa (James Gammon) carries on a lengthy, non-responsive call and response with his nagging wife, who shouts back from offstage. What follows is a litany of weirdness (son Tilden returning from the backyard with armfuls of fresh vegetables that weren’t there the day before), ominous metaphor (son Bradley jamming his fingers into his brother’s girlfriend’s mouth, perhaps to represent the terrible secret they all refuse to speak), and sick humor (grandson Vince stealing Bradley’s false leg and taunting him with it.
Since “The Most Awful Family in Great Britain” is one of my favorite Monty Python sketches, I’m very much game for the bleak shenanigans of Buried Child, even willing to go with things that don’t make logical sense (Vince’s girlfriend goes from being creeped out by the family’s house to running it with Pinteresque equanimity, to being tossed out of it). Maybe because I’m young and middle-class, Shepard’s comic awfulness reaches me more than Albee’s amusing emptiness. (Or is it simply that the sound of a husk being ripped off an ear of corn is less familiar than the clinking of ice cubes in a gin and tonic?)
As father Dodge, James Gammon plays his one-note character like an 88-key grand, braying, squinting, bullying, and begging. Lois Smith is just as marvelous as his wife, holding the stage for 15 minutes even though we can’t even see her. Though shrill at times, Kelly Overbey makes a suitably wary ingenue. Even better are Terry Kinney’s dazed, hangdog Tilden and Leo Burmester’s roiling Bradley. If only Jim True, as Tilden’s “normal” son, Vince, didn’t pace and prattle like Quentin Tarantino. Also out of place is Jim Mohr, whose priest seems to have stepped out of a Norman Lear sitcom.
Two other characters have a crucial presence in Buried Child: the calamitous secret buried in the backyard, and the house itself. Robert Brill’s gray, rustic living-room set, with its imposing staircase, ratty couch, and screened porch, could not be a more hellish representation of a (morally) impoverished midwest.
With this Steppenwolf revival, Buried Child becomes the first play Sam Shepard’s ever had on Broadway. Hmmm . . . isn’t True West due for an anniversary?
