Buried Child by Sam Shepard, City Theatre, February 4 - 21

Tom Waits’ discordant, sardonic music is a perfect match for Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. The program doesn't credit anyone, but City's artistic director Andy Berkovsky tells me director Caleb Straus made the choice. Like Tom Waits, Shepard brings us into a world of discord and grotesque despair. He creates a distorted vision of the all American rural idyll.

Think you’ve had a tough time visiting the prospective in-laws? Forget it. Shepard topped your experience, all the way back in 1978, just as Waits was stumbling into alcoholic stardom.

Vince and Shelly take a road trip, heading through Illinois, the heart of America, on their way to New Mexico for an unannounced visit on Vince’s dad. Shelly puts up with Vince’s enthusiasms and anecdotes about this school, that playground and his other narcissistic memories, and then they pull into the drive of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Into the middle of a very bad dream.

Read more and see images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Buried Child by Sam Shepard, City Theatre, February 4 - 21

Click for ALT review, February 9

Received directly:

The City Theatre Company digs deep to present
Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning drama

Buried Child

February 4 - 21
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m. Sundays at 5:30 p.m.
No show on Saturday, February 6
The City Theatre is at 3823 Airport Blvd. – east corner of Airport Blvd. and 38 ½ Street, behind the Shell station.
Reservations 512-524-2870 or info@citytheatreaustin.org
Tickets $15 - $20. Guaranteed Front Row Reserved Seats $25. Students $12. Group discounts are available. Thursdays, all seats $10.

Sam Shepard's Buried Child is an American masterpiece by one of the most successful counter-culture playwrights of our generation. This darkly comic tale of a Midwestern family with a terrible secret achieved national recognition as an instant classic, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 and garnering outstanding critical acclaim.

Like many of Shepard's plays, Buried Child is characterized by a poetic sensibility and offbeat sense of humor, as well as startling imagery that conjures up the decline of the great American West. This production will run from February 4 – 21.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Southwestern University, April 22 - 26

Sam Shephard's Buried Child gives such a strange, phantasmagoric world that one's first impulse might be to play it for laughs. In Shephard's introduction to the printed edition he speaks of revising the text for the 1995 Steppenwolf theatre company in Chicago and of director Gary Sinese's "instinct to push the characters and situation in an almost burlesque territory, which suddenly seemed right."

At Southwestern University, director Jared J. Stein and his exemplary young ensemble of players create Shephard's horrible world without a trace of mockery. We are obliged to take seriously this collection of incomprehensibly distorted and injured individuals, and the result approaches the seriousness and purpose of classical tragedy.

This ample but claustrophobic farmhouse exists in an undefined locale, in a state of malaise. Ill, coughing, and stationary on the sofa is Dodge, a foul-tempered old man who swills whiskey on the sly; his wife Halie is at first unseen, heard from upstairs in a long, self-preoccupied nagging litany. Two grown sons eventually appear. Tilden, a raw stunned man in a glistening yellow rainslicker and mud-caked boots; and later, Bradley, a one-legged brute and coward who regularly sneaks into the house at night to give his sleeping father Dodge haircuts with the brutality of a sheep-shearer. Halie leaves in the first act to call on clergyman Father Dewis and in Act Three, the next day, returns with Dewis in tow, chatting with unseemly familiarity and bearing a bouquet of yellow roses.

Click to read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Southwestern University, April 22 - 26

UPDATE: Click for ALT review




From the website of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Southwestern University, Georgetown:

Buried Child
by Sam Shepard
Directed by Jared J. Stein
April 22–26, 2009
Southwestern University

Winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, this powerful and brilliant play probes deep into the disintegration of the American Dream. A bizarre and explosive family reunion takes place unexpectedly when a prodigal grandson returns to his estranged family’s Illinois farm. At first recognized by neither his grandparents nor his own father, he soon realizes this homecoming has unearthed an unwanted family inheritance, rather than the idealized mid-western roots he hoped to find. Sometimes humorous, often monstrous, the play’s roots in ritual and its approach to monumental, timeless themes of human suffering—incest, murder, deceit and rebirth—resemble the destruction wreaked by the heroes of Greek Tragedy.

Read More on AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .