Problem Child

NewGate can't resurrect Buried

by Bill Rodriguez

BURIED CHILD, by Sam Shepard. Directed by Tom Grady. At NewGate Theatre through May 23.

Pulitzer drama awards committees love American families, the more dysfunctional the better. So in 1978 they swooned, of course, over Buried Child, by avant-garde/mainstream cross-over champ Sam Shepard. The basic thrust was clear enough -- young man returns to problematical family after years' estrangement -- and the play had more mythical dimension and implicit cultural critiques than Sunday dinner on Mt. Olympus.

Trouble is, Shepard has writes the kind of tragi-comedies that need to be performed brilliantly or not at all. At first glance Shepard's characters may look inconsequential, petty and twisted, but the ones who are central to his tales have inner dimensions as large as the world. His text provides mutterings of incantation for the sorcery he seeks to urge forth, but it's up to the acting troupe to chant the chants, summon the spirits and remind us, as Shepard always demands, of our longing for connection, that simultaneous curse and cure.

Despite some earnest performances, NewGate Theatre can't coax the magic out of Buried Child, the play that Trinity Repertory Company took to India and Syria in 1981. The play is engaging on a visceral level, when convincingly performed, so it's Trinity legend how foreign audiences, most of whom knew no English, were enthralled by the family ferment.

Directed by Tom Grady, what little action there is is simple to follow. The central-Illinois family, on what long ago was a working farm, is as ramshackled as we can imagine their barn being. The old patriarch, Dodge (Tom Hurdle), spends most of his time on the couch, coughing and spitting when he isn't complaining. His chirpy wife, Halie (Enedina Garcia), feigns obliviousness to problems and runs off for a drunken overnight bender with her boyfriend, Father Dewis (Paul Hoover). Son Bradley (Justin Ashforth) is a sadist, shaving his sleeping father's head, on the pretext of giving him a haircut, until it bleeds. At the outset, a surreal element is introduced: son Tilden (Joe Mecca) brings in armloads of vegetables, first ears of corn and then carrots, from a backyard his mother insists is barren. We eventually learn that buried back there is a murdered newborn, the product of incest with one of the sons and Halie.

Into this zoo enters Tilden's young son Vince (Brien

Lang), away for six years, on his way to see his father, who he doesn't know has recently come back from New Mexico after 20 years. With him is his girlfriend Shelly (Constanze Almonte), who is understandably spooked by these Midwest Munsons. Soon she's afraid she might have walked into the Mansons, when Bradley forces his fingers into her mouth in a grotesque token rape.

Several contributions build to good effect in this production. An incessant background rainfall helps bind the antic scenes to the serious ones. The decrepit living room set, designed by Matthew Doherty, is as littered as an untidy mind, the stairs at right as isolated as the steps to a gallows. And some of the actors are consistently compelling. As the old man, Hurdle is as obdurate and steadfast as a force of nature, even though he's vulnerable to Bradley's cruelty. In making the self-pitying Bradley, who cut off his leg in a chainsaw accident, as mean as a bag of snakes, Ashforth is riveting in his scenes and exchanges, even as a flinching coward in the last act. Crucially, Mecca makes the soft-spoken Tilden work for us, nearly catatonic in private reverie, although I could have used more evidence of his feelings toward the others, such as when he was annoyed at his mother's picking up his strewn corn husks.

But for a Shepard play to get through to us, since the actions are only incidental to inner turmoil, every character must connect with every other one until the stage is a web of unspoken relationships. For example, by the time Vince returns from an overnight trip to a liquor store, we need to have a felt sense of his desperation, of both why he abandoned Shelly there and why he felt compelled to come back. Similarly, we need to sense that Shelly's surviving and even thriving in that crazed company has brought out capacities she didn't know she had.

This production uses Shepard's revision, which Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company brought to New York for a 1996 revival. The playwright tightened up the play a bit and made some of the dialogue, and signature extended monologues, more conversational in tone.

Buried Child is both a lament for this nation's lost potential and a celebration of our optimism, our ability to keep affirmation burgeoning forth despite our limitations. This play is powerful enough to transcend the shortcomings of any production.