Welcome from the Artistic Director

“That corpse you planted in your garden. Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? . . . Oh keep the Dog hence that’s friend to man/Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.” No one can authoritatively say whether Sam Shepard was thinking of T.S. Eliot’s lines from The Wasteland when he sat down to compose Buried Child. But there are striking similarities between the two works, particularly in their common use of vegetative rituals, not to mention the way they both contrast fertility and sterility, rain and drought, through images of impotence and abundance. The vicious son, Bradley, maimed like Eliot’s Fisher King (he’s missing a leg), represents the menace and desolation abroad in the land, while Shepard’s kinder elder son, Tilden, like Eliot’s friendly dog scratching at the topsoil, digs into an “arid plain” to find the sprouting corpse of a child.

The Buried Child of Shepard’s title is a family secret that is gradually exhumed, brought to the surface, and exposed to the light. This process of theatrical exhumation places Shepard squarely in the Ibsenite tradition of modern drama. For like Ibsen, Shepard fashions a deceptively realistic surface to disguise his secret procedures. Buried Child is Shepard’s Ghosts, insofar as the specters of a dysfunctional family are being painfully exposed to light. And it also bears a considerable resemblance to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (scheduled for later this season on the A.R.T. stage) insofar as the unholy secrets of a father, mother, and two sons (in both plays a third son has died) are forced into consciousness against the wishes of the other characters. Additionally, like O’Neill’s earlier Desire Under the Elms, Buried Child is a play in which the family home almost becomes the central character – everybody wants to own this particular piece of real estate. It is a house that renews itself through pain, almost as if the very bricks and mortar were taking on another life. As well as being a family play, Buried Child possesses powerful social implications. The action is set in the midwest Ñ in Norman Rockwell country (“Dick and Jane and Spot and Mom and Dad and Junior and Sis,” as Shelly satirizes this cliche of American family values). But the play suggests that the underside of all this Saturday Evening Post wholesomeness is crawling with rot and maggots. There are three generations depicted here – the last is dead and buried. Could it be that the murdered baby in the title of this play also represents the lost innocence and golden promise of America itself, a country which once had the potential to be another Eden, before being forced by primal sins to repeat and perpetuate all the errors of the past?

Whatever your reading, Buried Child remains Shepard’s masterpiece – humorous and ominous, hilarious and mysterious – and, for all my remarks about literally parallels, completely original. Offered here in a newly revised version, it is a play that demonstrates once again that among those who still preserve the original promise of America are its children, its innocents, and its artists.