Heavy, intense and subtle, Buried Child will stay with you long after the final scene
It felt a little like Sam Shepard’s Buried Child should come with a warning label — like one of those trigger warnings we see these days. At the very least, I’d have liked to have been a bit more prepared for what I was about to encounter with this heavy drama about a broken family on a defunct farm in Illinois.
Director Steve Keim brings this intense play to life (though I’m not sure we could say any of the family members are really living, more like simply existing) at Fort Collins’ Bas Bleu Theatre. We first meet Dodge (James Valone) on a couch you might find on the side of the road (it reminded me of something I once had in college). He doesn’t look much better than the couch. It’s raining and he’s coughing. There are several medicine bottles on the box TV.
Then we (kind of) meet Dodge’s wife, Halie (Nancy Patton). She’s hidden at the top of the stairs. “You should take a pill for that! I don’t see why you just don’t take a pill. Be done with it once and for all,” Halie yells down to Dodge. It’s supposedly about the cough, but it’s that “once and for all” that really makes you wonder.
There’s subtlety like this throughout the play. You have to read between the lines a lot, yet there’s a lot of different pages between those lines and it’s difficult to know which way to lean. So instead, you imagine a lot and kind of hope you’re not right.
After a lot of yelling back and forth while Dodge sneaks sips of whisky from a bottle hidden in the couch cushions, Tilden (Jeffrey Bigger) enters the home with an armful of corn. He’s barefoot and dirty and, it quickly becomes clear, not right in the head. Bigger does a superb job of playing this gentle giant who reminded me of Lennie from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
A nearly one-sided discussion ensues between Dodge and Tilden about where exactly the corn came from. Tilden insists it came from just outside, while Dodge says the farm hasn’t produced since the mid 1930s. It’s the late ’70s.
Things are slow moving with this play, and you have to pay attention to understand all the secrets this family holds. We learn of another son, possibly murdered by his wife on their honeymoon. And another with only one leg. And yet another son, a baby, buried somewhere with the corn?
When an outsider, Shelly (Elisabeth Sells) shows up with Vince (Brett Schreiber) the supposed grandson of Dodge and Halie (yet no one seems to recognize him after his six-year absence), secrets that have held the family together (or torn them apart) are revealed with the sort of relief that comes from finally letting go.
It is not at all surprising that this play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It is weird (the one-legged son tells Shelly to open her mouth and then proceeds to stick his hand it in.) It is genius in its subtlety (I can’t tell you how much you’ll have to work to muddle it all out.) It is heartbreaking (that final scene though!). And it is entirely worth the two and half hours it takes to know this sad, failing family.
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