Buried Child
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But as the hero of Buried Child learns, you can’t go home again. Well, you can, but things won’t be the same. Buried Child isn’t a bad show; it’s certainly not a decayed relic, like the farmhouse to which Vince returns, searching for his roots. That dilapidated farmhouse, designed by Robert Brill and lit by Kevin Rigdon, is one of the production’s greatest assets: sprawling, surreally tall, with buckling floorboards, an improbably steep stairway, and a mounted stag’s head peering over the trashed-out TV room in which the action occurs. And the cast–packed with Sinise’s LA colleagues but featuring only one Steppenwolf member–turn in strong and showy if unsubtle performances that emphasize Shepard’s skill at writing actors’ set pieces, weirdly hilarious exercises in which obsessive characters with conflicting needs crash headlong into each other. But in Sinise’s staging, which emphasizes the script’s bleak, sardonic comedy while missing its crucial sense of mystery and awe, the work comes off as dated and derivative.
Using a family’s festering secrets to symbolize the corruption of the American spirit, Buried Child concerns Dodge (played by James Gammon with a foghorn voice and an obscene leer), a dying patriarch, and the sons who’ve inherited his legacy of shame. Tilden (Ted Levine), the eldest, is a hulking burnout who’s returned to the ol’ homestead after some undefined trouble in New Mexico; though the farm hasn’t produced healthy crops since 1935, Tilden has discovered a mysterious bumper harvest of corn–a sign of renewed fertility that’s rooted, the play gradually reveals, in a primal sin. Tilden’s brother Bradley (Leo Burmester), who’s taken control of the farm from his parents, is a sadistic, one-legged lout, the scum who’s risen to the top. Vince (Ethan Hawke), Tilden’s son by an unnamed mother, is a hippie musician who fled the farm as a teenager but has come back for a fateful visit. At first unrecognized and rejected by the other men–though they welcome his girlfriend, Shelly (Kellie Overbey), with undisguised delight–Vince is transformed from a confused outsider to a rampaging avenger who drives Bradley away and claims the farmhouse as his own. The play’s climax finds Vince in possession of the legacy he once rejected–the prodigal prince, now ruler of a kingdom of the damned.
