SURREALISM MASKED BY REALISM
SAM SHEPARD'S BURIED CHILD

a Review of Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize Winning Play
as Produced by the University of Illinois University Theatre
at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

by James L. Seay

When I told a friend that I would be traveling to Urbana to review a production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child, she remarked, "That should be a barrel of laughs." While she was attempting to be satirical, she was, as a matter of fact, correct. In actuality, Shepard, the infant terrible of the theatrical American counter-culture manages to twist the standard American Dream into a bizarre, surrealistic and somewhat silly nightmare, wherein the members of a dysfunctional, disjointed farm family from Illinois manage to act out their frustrations in a wildly violent manner through a series of uproarious scenes. While, perhaps, not a barrel of laughs, it was composed of several darn good chuckles.

Shepard has a hard time shedding his Illinois connection. He was born at Fort Sheridan, Illinois and earlier this year, was stopped for D.U.I in Normal, the twin city of Bloomington, after some serious drinking at a local watering hole. In the early morning hours of January 3, 2009, Shepard was arrested and charged with speeding and drunken driving in Normal, Illinois; his blood alcohol content was allegedly 0.175 (the legal limit being .08). Shepard was taken to the McLean County Jail, in Bloomington, IL, and posted bond after processing. He pleaded guilty to both charges on February 11, 2009 and was sentenced to 24 months probation, alcohol education classes, and 100 hours of community service.

The characters in Shepard's four "family" plays seem to have a direct connection to the Kalakak family. Buried Child certainly does. In the KCPA production, directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon, the roles of the father, Dodge, and the mother, Halie, played respectively by Gary Ambler and Joi Hoffsommer, two of the finest theatrical assets in at least Central Illinois if not the entire state, become a somewhat stereotypical Shepard alcoholic father and nagging mother, the play (like his other "family" plays) being mildly autobiographical. In their relationship with each other, as well as their two surviving sons, Tilden, barely above an idiot (Ethan Gardner) and Bradley, who lost his leg to a chainsaw accident (Marty Scanlon), as well as Vince, their grandson (Volen Ilieve) and his girl friend, Shelly, the outsider, excellently portrayed by Alysia Rae, and Jeremiah Lowry as the ineffectual, adulterous, alcoholic Protestant "priest" Father Dewis, they bring Shepard's characters to life on the stage in a hilarious, frightening fashion. With the exception of Ambler and Hoffsommer, the balance of the cast are Bachelor of Fine Arts candidates at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign's Theatre Department.

There are a couple of characters that we never really meet, as they are dead when the play opens. The son, Ansel, who, according to his mother, was a hero - a star basketball player and brave soldier, yet died under mysterious circumstances in a motel room, and an alluded-to baby. While not physically present on stage, both become powerful players in the drama we witness on stage.

Buried Child has been compared to an "optical illusion," as it plays with your head and messes with your mind. Shepard's dialogue and Dixon's directing at first seem comic and even occasionally hilarious, but still leaves the audience puzzled and, to a degree, dismayed and indefinably saddened. Yet, as Fredrick Robert Karl said in "A Chronicle of Wasted Time," there is a swing to it all, "a vagrant freedom, a tattered song."

After dropping tons of confusing, yet pointed clues, Shepard never truly answers the riddle of the buried child. Was its father Dodge, or Tilden, or Ansel, or Bradley or even Father Dewis? And could his final disinterment somehow symbolize the Christian belief of resurrection? Indeed, Shepard has corn, carrots and flowers growing where none have grown for years. Yet, in the end, it seems that this "miracle," instead of yielding fertility and rebirth, produces nothing but death and decay. As the last act dissolves into chaos, the audience is left wondering, could the solution of the play be, as the critic Harold Clurman has suggested, that Vince, the grandson, and the buried child might be one in the same person, each a fantasy of what the other might have been under different circumstances?

In a way, Buried Child shares the ranks of American classic "family" dramas with Williams' The Glass Menagerie and O'Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night. What separates it from them, however, is that Buried Child, through its blending of realism and surrealism, becomes all of the things that it is about - emotional violence and the mystery of the family bond.

Buried Child continues to be presented at the Studio Theatre in the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 South Goodwin Avenue on the Urbana Campus of the University of Illinois, Wednesday through Saturday, October 14 through 17 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 18 at 3:00 p.m. For ticket information call (217) 333-6280.