Home, bitter home

By Emily Bobrow

Most of Sam Shepard’s plays consider the limits of manhood. The gruff, ornery men who populate his imagination are often broken in a way, hobbled by time and disappointment. They roam some dusty part of the American west, as unsure of themselves as they are of the way forward. They speak laconically, if at all, and they’ve got beef with their fathers. Even when the women are central, as objects of love or scorn, they remain peripheral. The objective of these plays is not to entertain, or even to offer some kind of catharsis. Rather, it is to deliver a brand of discomfort, like the feeling of gazing into a mirror in harsh light after a bad day.

“Buried Child”, the dark and perplexing play that won Shepard the Pulitzer prize in 1979, has just reopened in a powerful off-Broadway production from the New Group in New York, directed by Scott Elliott. Troubled families may be the life-blood of theatre, but few nuclear units appear to take as little pleasure in each other as this one.