Word: sheparded
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...Shepard's dramas of blasted American lives, the terror never stays so politely out of sight--it's usually smacking you in the face. Buried Child, first produced in 1978, opens with a marital conversation conducted across a chasm. Dodge, a foghorn-voiced geezer (a hilarious James Gammon), sits nearly immobile on a couch, exchanging shouts with his wife (Lois Smith), who spends most of the first act offstage. One grown son (Terry Kinney) shuffles in and out with armfuls of corn; another (Leo Burmester) stomps around on a false leg and terrorizes his father by snipping his hair while...
Edward Albee and Sam Shepard came of age in an era when playwrights could be stars too. Albee's excoriating family drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shook Broadway out of its comfy seats in 1962 and established him as the premier American playwright of the post-Arthur Miller generation. Shepard (though his work has largely been ignored by Broadway until now) was the most acclaimed and charismatic playwright to emerge off-Broadway in the 1960s and '70s (The Tooth of Crime, Curse of the Starving Class). Now both authors are being celebrated with Broadway revivals of Pulitzer-prizewinning...
...nuttiness--and Buried Child has more laughs than anything else on Broadway this season--the play has a familiar dramatic structure. Two outsiders, the couple's grandson and his girlfriend, show up, and a sordid family secret is revealed. Buried Child may be Shepard's most coherent and chilling dissection of the American family. Director Gary Sinise's feral production hits just the right pitch--high, but not over the top. The Tony voters fudged a bit when they nominated Buried Child for best new play (Shepard has done some cutting and rewriting). But this season, who can complain...
...Broadway" and "SAM SHEPARD play" are not words that normally belong together. After all, this is the edgy, reclusive intellectual who collaborated with Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Wim Wenders. Ah, well, nothing lasts forever. Shepard's 1979 Pulitzer-prizewinning Buried Child will open April 30 on Broadway. "The play was never designed for Broadway," says Shepard. "It started in a 95-seat theater in San Francisco." But under the direction of another sometime film star, Gary Sinise, things changed. "It's a lot clearer now," the playwright says. "And the humor has been brought out." Fans of Shepard...
...American dream and the working class are still an affecting source of drama; Sam Shepard and David Mamet are proof. But Death of a Salesman, with its focus on idealism, fails to address the core concerns of an increasingly skeptical world that has already learned from Willy's lesson. Idealism is not a universal frailty like Othello's jealousy or Hamlet's indecision, but a transient societal attitude, and one that is not pervasive today. Those who do not agree will probably enjoy the show...