Event

BURIED CHILD by Sam Shepard

The Play: In 1979 Buried Child won the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama ever awarded to a play
premiering Off-Broadway, propelling Shepard into the national spotlight. Exploring a dark side of
the American Dream, the play chronicles three generations of a Midwestern family struggling
against each other, some denying and repressing a past others are desperate to reveal, all haunted by
the sudden fertility of their long-barren fields. From its darkly humorous opening to an implosive
final act, the play examines the corrosive effects of a long-held secret in a family ravaged by guilt
and shame.
Buried Child premiered at Theater for the New City in New York City on October 19, 1978. Harold
Clurman wrote, in The Nation, What strikes the ear and eye is comic, occasionally hilarious
behavior and speech at which one laughs while remaining slightly puzzled and dismayed (if not
resentful), and perhaps indefinably saddened. Yet there is a swing to it all, a vagrant freedom, a
tattered song.
The cast: features Jack Halton as Dodge, Margel Kaufman as Halie, Dean Shreiner as Tilden, Todd
OConnor as Bradley, Phaedra Starr as Shelly, Michael Carlisi as Vince and John Krause as Father
Dewis.