| Buried Child |
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| 1978 plays | |
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''Buried Child'' premiered at Theater for the New City in New York City on October 19 , 1978 . 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." 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 from the original, allegedly fixing edits that the original director had made to the text without Shepard's authorization. PLOT SUMMARY The play is a Macabre look at an American Midwestern Family with a dark, terrible secret: Years ago, Dodge, the family's patriarch drowned and buried a child in the field behind their farmhouse. Throughout the play it is assummed, but never made explicitly clear, that Tilden committed incest with his mother Halie and producing the 'buried child'. The act of infanticide destroyed the family. Dodge stopped planting crops in his fields and took to drinking and watching television, slowly decomposing and never moving from the family's lumpy old couch. Halie, apparently seeking salvation, turned to religion with fervor. She spouts Christian platitudes and cavorts with the hypocritical Father Dewis. Tilden became, as the stage directions state, profoundly 'burnt out' perhaps caused by guilt and grief and his mysterious time spent in New Mexico. He has only recently returned to the farmstead, perhaps to set everything right. The secret is drawn out into the light of day, and the family curse apparently lifted, with the arrival of Vince, Tilden's estranged son, and his girlfriend, Shelly. TEXT EDITION
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