Theatre Mirror Today's America

Louis Cohen-Boyer

Theatre Mirror Today's America

Jeannine Russell

May 6, 2013

 Buried Child, a Play about America 

        Buried Child is one of the most remarkable play in the modern theater which focuses on general topics. Some of modern theater plays are light and amusing and make the audience laugh. However, someothers more serious, make the audiences think. Sam Shepard employed startling production techniques to underscore his criticism of the American family and society in his 1978 drama Buried Child.  

        Sam Shepard, is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director.  After graduating from high school, Shepard attended San Antonio College to study agriculture but dropped out to join a touring repertory group, the Bishop’s Company. During his career, Shepard wrote different stories, essays, and memoirs and received the Pulitzer Price for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. This play was also nominated to the Tony Awards for best play (Valada 3).The play as facinnated critics and audiences and as Don Shewey stated, (qtd in “Buried Child” “Theater”).

        The issues Shepard goes over include poor communication,identity and sense of heritage, destructive violence, male emasculation, poor productivity and fertility , and the lack of effectiveness of religion and its leaders. Shepard used different tools to include all this issues in his play. In the first act, the poor communication issue comes up at the very beginning of the play. The characters are trying to talk while they are in different rooms and on different floors too far away to each other to hear easily. Both characters keep on repeating everything, and the audience realizes that both characters do not care about what the other says. For example, in the Bedford textbook in the first sentence of the play, Halie is trying to get Dodge’s attention. She keeps repeating during the first act p.1359,”What?” because she cannot hear when Dogdge is talking. Halie is trying to talk to Dodge, and he is just staring at the TV without paying attention to her. During the second act, there is a nonsense conversation about where Shelly is from between Dodge and Shelly.Also, Vince stomach puppet show reveals the history of this lack of effective communication. In the second act, p.1367. Dodge states,” You did not do what you told me. You didn’t stay here with me.” This quote shows how bad the relationship is since Dodge does not even realize that he is talking to Vince and not Tilden. To communicate, Bradley has to use violence instead of real communication, and the act of putting his fingers in Shelly’s mouth shocks the audience. In the third act, there are two different rooms, two different floors as the play ends with the same communication problems as the plan began with two different separate conversations. Vince does not notice the most important information of Tilden carrying a baby’s corpse upstsair, Halie is talking to herself, and Vince is not listening to her. Shepard is trying to show that people do not listen to each other, and because of this lack of communication, people have trouble solving problems together.