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review Many a well-intentioned director has been lured towards treacherous theatrical shoals by the seductive siren's wail of Sam Shepard's 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Buried Child. Enticed by the eccentric, captivating characters, more than one production has made the mistake of presenting Shepard's decaying Midwestern farm clan as strictly real, as though this bunch might be the Loman family transported out to the farm and given thirty more years of whiskey to sop up and brood over. Such approaches to the play invariably doom it to the deadly rocks of Shepard's elusive and compelling allegorical underpinnings. Director Julia Rodriquez Elliott's staging of Buried Child at A Noise Within in Glendale doesn't completely dash itself to bits, but it is taking on water fast by Act 3. Elliott and her mostly capable cast have mined the humor of the play -- and there is much to be found -- but have neglected the tragic ferocity that roils beneath the rancid topsoil. And, as much as this is an easy and overused description, it is nonetheless applicable here: this production is a sitcom version of the play. What do I mean by "sitcom"? I mean that all the characters relate at all times on a single, laugh-tracked "real" plane. The complex, interwoven textures of the play, the real with the fantastic, the truth with the memory, are blithely ignored for the laughs which skitter easily across the surface. Such a lack of depth all but completely deflates the power of Shepard's central metaphor of the buried child. Is the murdered infant planted out back the product of an incestuous relationship between mother Halie and son Tilden? Or did the murder happen "long before" Tilden was even born? Dodge, the couch-ridden, whiskey-swilling family patriarch purports both scenarios to be true in separate drunken ravings. Or, is the "buried child" in fact Vince, the grandson who returns after a six-year absence and whom no one in the family seems to recognize? Shepard, to his great credit, never explains. This production, sadly, never gives us much opportunity to even speculate. The cast is surprisingly uneven for a professional staging. Geoff Elliott as Tilden, the former All-American halfback whose life took some kind of ruinous turn in New Mexico, is superb. Likewise, June Claman as Halie. Neil Vipond displays a fine sense of comic timing and flashes of sedentary power, yet seems so intentionally reined-in, so limited to the sad surface humor of Dodge's rants. And Jill Hill as Shelly, Vince's girlfriend and crucial link between the real (us) and the bizarre world we are witnessing (them), seems completely lost. Shelly as written is quite possibly the most difficult of all in the play to pull off, but Hill, with her coy posturing and annoying kindergarten teacher's intonations, seems not even to understand the world she is in. The glib, smirking world of Friends, this ain't. Hill's weakness when she needs to be strongest, in Act 3, seriously undermines the devastating tragedy of the family's dark secret and sends the play sliding towards a kind of freak-show burlesque. Something easily laughed at. And dismissed. The essential power of Buried Child is that the dark secret is never clearly explained or defined. Consequently, it becomes any dark secret. Every dark secret. Your dark secret. Mine. This production flails away at the surface yet never taps the deep vein of despair underneath. The human despair. The universal despair. Something much more difficult to laugh at. Or dismiss. |