This Pulitizer Prize winning drama continues to gnaw at the definition of modern tragedy. It could be a ghastly rural Absurdist farce, with lethargic and ill father trapped on the living room couch in front of the TV, and addled, wayward mother upstairs with her pictures or off spending private time with her pastor. Add an older son gone vaguely mad, while the surviving younger son is one-legged after an accident with a chain saw. Then bring the older son's son--whose mother is never mentioned--back for a visit after six years along with his California girlfriend. Even though it's supposed to Illinois on the edge of the plains, it's really Shepard's vision of a blasted modern rural America everywhere, whose roots are lost and whose citizens have spiralled into madness.
The paterfamilias, Dodge, played by Mike Lydon, lets his character's large vocabulary roll on even as he sits barely moving. Sandi McDonald as mother Halie, is heard for half the first scene before she appears. She hears very little of what anyone in her family says. John Greiner-Ferris, as eerie Tilden the oldest son, spends his first scene shucking corn as he too has a disconnected conversation with the old man. The first act ends with the sudden appearance of Jason Beals as limping Bradley up to no good as Dodge sleeps on the couch.
In the middle act, Tilden's son Vince, played by Joe Coffey arrives for an unannounced visit, accompanied by his California girlfriend Shelly, played by Stephanie Romano. For all the play's lurid details Shepard never supplies any about Tilden's wife. Vince carries a case which turns out to be a horn which is never played. It sits until the end next to a gun that's never used. The absurdity deepens as no one will admit to recognizing Vince, who eventually leaves to get Dodge a bottle. (Tilden has stolen his, which he isn't supposed to be drinking anyway. How Dodge got it in the first place is a mystery.) Shelley remains behind cutting up carrots that Tilden has brought in from somewhere. Despite her unease, the girl begins to minister to Dodge, giving him her rabbit skin jacket. By the end of the act she's being menaced by Bradley.
The next morning, at the opening of the final act, Bradley has forced Dodge off the couch and is sleeping there with his wooden leg propped at one end. Vince never came back and Shelley, who we learn slept upstairs in Halie's room full of pictures, is trying to get Dodge, who's slumped on the only other piece of furniture, an old milking stool, to take some beef bullion. The old man still wants his whiskey. Haile returns in a different dress along with Mark Bourbeau as Father Dewis, who's carrying a large bunch of white roses and her whiskey flask. Mother controls the scene while drinking, intimidating Shelley slightly, until Vince returns roaring drunk and is seen through the screens smashing beer bottles. The final battle for the soul of this drama begins.
As usual, Shepard has twisted the expectations of a family drama into mythic form, using conversational non-sequitors and dropping hints of terrible family secrets as the play unfolds in Chekovian fashion. This living room is an Olympian stage where ordinary small town Midwesterners, with all their petty faults, become god-like actors in an eternal tragedy of mutual back-stabbing, infidelity, and death. IRNE winning director Bill Doscher has paced the action nicely, bringing a disperate cast together by the end. At times the author achieves a Beckett-like absurdity using American vernacular to drive home the disconnects in his character's lives, even as their precarious existences disintegrate. The Hovey's production, as usual, takes place on a redressed version of their basic set. This time, there's an actual rain effect outside the big windows at the back for the first half of the play, emphasizing the unreality of this seemingly realsitic drama, full of obscure symbols, haunted by a dead brother or two. Shepard's reworked 1995 version of his 1978 script adds little clarity but perhaps more irony. Its effectiveness was in fact demonstrated in the limited-run which closed last month in New York. Hovey's "Buried Child" is the third Shepard play in town this season, which bodes well perhaps for productions of his recent works here sometime soon.
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