Crazy Farm

BURIED CHILD

by Sam Shepard

If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard. His theme is betrayal, not so much of the American dream as of the inner health of the nation. He focuses on that point at which the spacious skies turned ominous with clouds of dread, and the amber waves of grain withered in industrial blight and moral dry rot.

This may sound doom-laden, but the plays are redeemed by irrepressible freshets of surreal humor. Buried Child, now at off-Broadway's Theater de Lys, concerns itself with a zany Illinois farm family. Dodge (Richard Hamilton), the grandfather, is a prickly relic whose security blanket is the whisky bottle under it. His wife Halie (Jacqueline Brookes) is the voice of the nag incarnate. The eldest son Tilden (Tom Noonan) is laconic, even for a neo-Neanderthal. For him, the barren fields yield armfuls of corn and carrots, which are duly shucked, sliced and nibbled onstage.

For comedic menace, very much in the Pinter vein, there is the homecoming of the grandson Vince (Christopher McCann), who returns unrecognized after a six-year absence. The family's horrific secret emerges when Tilden unearths a baby's black mummified body, his incestuous offspring by Halie, drowned in in fancy by Dodge. With the family purged of this infamous act, the farm will presumably thrive under Vince.

This crazy house is not all that crazy. Shepard links his characters, however kinky, to the blood consciousness of D. H. Lawrence, to mythic forces that defy the intellect yet stir primal fears and lusts. The cast is exemplary, paced by Hamilton's Dodge, a blistered shadow of Lear on a parched prairie heath.--T.E.K.

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