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.
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