Buried Child is a typical Sam Shepard play. The main character, Dodge, is a brain-damaged alcoholic cripple stuck in a Midwest shack with a half-witted xenophobic wife shrieking at him from the coal cellar. The wife makes an early speech about her son who ‘married a Catholic whore’ and got stabbed to death by her on his honeymoon. This sets the tone for the play. Every character is a shrill, chippy barbarian and every speech is an exercise in tragicomic one-upmanship. The audience for Shepard’s work consists of social voyeurs who want to gawp at the underclass from a safe distance.
The play purports to be a mystery but the family secret is revealed in the title. Even so, Shepard proceeds as if there were a puzzle to solve. He keeps offering us ‘clues’. A clod-hopper called Tilden limps on stage bearing a harvest of miraculous corn, gathered from the backyard, which causes both his parents to have fits of high-decibel guilt. Tilden peels the corn and then clod-hops back out and returns with a fresh harvest. Carrots this time. He duly peels them while attempting to bond with Dodge. More invalids lurch in. Drunken Vince arrives with whiny Shelly who gets crudely tortured by thick Bradley, but she takes revenge by ripping Bradley’s false leg off and clutching it like a baby. Drunken Vince produces a sack of empty bottles and pelts them at the walls while Bradley writhes on the ground attempting to polish the filthy floorboards with his hairdo.
It’s sad to see trained actors dumped on this scrapheap. Barnaby Kay, a rare talent with an athletic build and a poetic nature, is stuck in the role of the brain-dead Tilden, who passes his time on stage beheading carrots and grunting.
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