Ensemble Digs Up Sam Shepard’s ‘Buried Child’

Formative years and family dynamics make for a combustible mixture.

By Gerald Carpenter, Noozhawk Contributor | Published on 01.28.2009

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Santa Barbara’s venerable Ensemble Theatre Company starts off the new year with a production of a true American classic, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy, Buried Child. Directed by the Ensemble’s executive artistic director, Jonathan Fox, Buried Child has its first performance Thursday in the Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St. The official “opening night” is Saturday and the play runs through Feb. 22.

Playwright, actor, director and musician Sam Shepard won a Pulitzer Prize for <i>Buried Child</i>, next at the Ensemble.” width=“350” height=“377” /><div class=Playwright, actor, director and musician Sam Shepard won a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child, next at the Ensemble.
Like all of Shepard’s most deeply felt plays, Buried Child explores the aftermath of an exploded family. This family lives on a farm in Illinois, the state where Shepard was born and raised. The family is dominated, as in so many Shepard plays, by a drunken, foul-mouth patriarch named Dodge. Dodge and his wife, Halie, a sanctimonious lady who is nevertheless not above going on drinking bouts with the local minister, live with their two sons, Tilden, a former All-American football player with steadily declining mental capacity, and Bradley, who has cut off one of his own legs with a chain saw. Unless acted on by an outside force, the four members of the family spend their days in endless recriminations and abusive banter. There is little or no work to do, since nothing has grown on the farm for years and years.

The play begins with the return to the homestead of a grandson, Vince — whom no one in the family either recognizes or remembers — and his girlfriend, Shelly. Vince and Shelly seem like sane people visiting a madhouse, at first. Curiously, at the same time as Vince’s return, the farm spontaneously begins to sprout corn.

The family has a secret in its past, of course, and it is a grisly one. They have spent the long years since pursuing strategies of denial and displacement, but Vince’s arrival forces the issue. One of Shepard’s more cosmic insights is that the “nuclear family,” with just mom and dad and the kids, is a three-legged stool, and that one of the legs going bad means the whole family falls over.

“A writer’s youth is his capital,” as Graham Greene once observed, and Shepard has clearly put his capital to work for him. His own father was just such a roaring drunken maniac as appears as the father in most of his plays. Shepard has characterized the difference between his father drunk and his father sober as the difference between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The last time Shepard saw his father, the man was loudly and hysterically abusing his son, who made the decision to not yell back but to walk away. Three weeks later, the father stumbled onto the highway in a stupor and was struck and killed. Going through his father’s personal effects afterward, Shepard found a stack of unsent letters, one of them, to Sam, ended, “You may think there’s a great calamity that happened way back then, this so-called “disaster” between me and your mother. You may actually think it had something to do with you. But you’re dead wrong. Whatever took place between me and her was strictly personal. See you in my dreams.”

The Ensemble production of Buried Child, stars Leonard Kelly-Young as Dodge, Anne Gee Byrd as Halie, Geoffrey Lower as Tilden, Louis Lotorto as Bradley, Graham Miller as Vince, and Kate Steele as Shelly. The minister who serves as Halie’s drinking partner is played by Lee Goncharoff.

Buried Child will play at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Single tickets range from $29 to $42, with discounts available for seniors and students. Click here for subscriptions, single tickets and group tickets or call 805.965.5400.

Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.

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