Grim With A Grin ‘Buried Child’ Contains Gloomy Plot, But Play Is Surprisingly A Comedy

This is one American family that doesn’t merely have a skeleton in the closet, it has a skeleton in the ground.

That’s the “Buried Child” of the title. In this 1978 Sam Shepard Pulitzer Prize-winning play, a grandson, Vince, returns to the Illinois family farm to find the family sick, morbid and spiritually bankrupt. The patriarch of the family, Dodge, is prone to pronouncements such as, “I’m descended from a long line of corpses and there’s not a living soul behind me.”

Sounds like a laff-riot, doesn’t it? Sounds like it has as many yuks as Eugene O’Neill.

Actually, “Buried Child,” which opens Friday at the Spokane Civic Theatre’s Firth Chew Studio Theatre, is billed as a dark gothic comedy.

And it is a comedy, especially in its present form. Shepard re-wrote the play in 1995 for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and the result was a touch lighter than the original.

“I geared the play towards this humor, because I felt the play in our first production was too heavy,” Shepard told American Theatre magazine last September.

“There’s a lot of humor in it - based mainly on Dodge’s kind of out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth humor, his sarcasm, that strange World War II humor that I wanted to emphasize. I think the play works because the audience is allowed into this kind of strange humor in spite of themselves. They have to laugh at this character, even though he’s killed a child. Otherwise, it’s deadly.”

Not too many playwrights would want to mess with a Pulitzer-winning play, but Shepard said that he always felt the original was “verbose and overblown” and “unnecessarily complicated.”

“There were a lot of things that were hanging, particularly with the character of Vince and his lostness and dismay at not being recognized,” said Shepard. “His predicament became clearer in retrospect. My emphasis (before) was on the old man, on Dodge.”

This revised version (which is what the Studio Theatre production will use) was so successful in Chicago, starring Ethan Hawke among others, that it went on to Broadway in 1996 in a production directed by Gary Sinise. A London production is now under way.

Shepard is one of the best-known of contemporary playwrights. His plays include “True West,” “Fool for Love,” “A Lie of the Mind” and “The Tooth of the Crime.”

He was considered an avant-garde theatrical experimenter through the ‘60s and ‘70s, using what the Oxford Companion to American Theatre called “an imaginative language composed of slang, scientific jargon, B-movie dialogue and rock ‘n’ roll idioms.”

Shepard is probably even better known from his second career, as a film actor.

He has appeared in “The Right Stuff,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Days of Heaven” and “Baby Boom,” among many others.

The Studio Theatre’s production of “Buried Child” is directed by William Marlowe. The cast includes Dennis Redford as Dodge and Elwon Bakly as Vince. The rest of the cast includes Malie Petersen, Stuart McKenzie, Jhon Goodwin, Alison Letson and Charlie Driskel.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THEATER Studio Theater presents “Buried Child” on Friday, Saturday and also on April 24-27, May 1-3 and 8-10. All shows are at 8 p.m., except the 2 p.m. Sunday matinee on April 27. Tickets: $8 (call 325-2507). The Firth Chew Studio Theatre is in the basement of the Spokane Civic Theatre, 1020 N. Howard.