Destiny's child
The ties that bind a family in Sam Shepard's seal its fate.

By J.H. Tompkins

Buried Child

I RECENTLY REREAD Buried Child, Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-winning, tragicomic exploration of familial dysfunction. You could call it a kind of redneck symphony – minus the music but bursting at the seams with denial, fear, and resignation. It had been years since I'd seen the play, but the words of Hallie, the family's sixtysomething matriarch who, after spying her nearly dead husband, Dodge, stretched out on a sofa covered with corn husks, were etched into my brain: "What is the meaning of this corn ...?"

I've wrestled with the implications of Hallie's question for 24 years. Or tried to, anyway. Once, my relationship with corn was defined exclusively by the dinner menu. The notion that green and brown husks and tight, moist kernels were pieces of something larger and more complicated never occurred to me.

I was a young man in 1978, but, it turns out, nothing I have picked up between the post-Hefner "Just Say No" years and the advent of America's millennial imperative, "Just Salute," helped me make sense of Buried Child's oddball questions and characters. Contrary and cranky, family members collide, hard, with everything and everyone. They change their minds without notice, regard time as an optional consideration in daily life, and are – all of them – so stricken by one single murderous, despairing act that their relationship to the world around them is tenuous at best.

Shepard staked his claim to the time-honored family drama with Buried Child, just as his earlier work had been shaped by unfettered exploration amid skirmishes along the generational divide. After the shooting stopped, it was time to confront something like adulthood in a world struggling to adjust to something like peace. In the late-'70s, post-Vietnam America woodenly tried to embrace a hackneyed narrative wherein prodigal sons and daughters laid down their arms and assumed a valued position in a wiser, more accepting American family. Shepard's contribution to the dialogue, intentionally or not, was to deliver a play as dyspeptic and in some ways murky as any of his earlier works.

The values of his generation were battle-tested, and as time passed, the demand for alternative perspectives skyrocketed – although in the grip of a nascent popular culture and at the mercy of the nation's short memory, what was embraced tended to be what fit on a standard-size bumper sticker.

The Reagan presidency would soon casually obliterate all traces of those days. But in 1979, when he won the Pulitzer, the country needed to cultivate the appearance of coming together. That his prize was well deserved makes it no less interesting to consider the forces at work when Buried Child was first staged, accelerating Shepard's journey from the culture's margins to its mainstream. Shepard's contribution to the national moment – a family of rednecks trapped in a time warp while being slowly destroyed by the dual burden of inherited sin and new, personally crafted transgression – ran counter to the manufactured spirit of things.

With Buried Child, Shepard created a world that careened back and forth in maddening, ambiguous bursts, unapologetically subverting narrative logic and expectation onstage and – in my mind, anyway – offering the freedom to break loose offstage as well.

Les Waters, who's directing American Conservatory Theater's production of Buried Child, opening this week, began a recent conversation by observing that Shepard's embrace of the traditional family drama wasn't purely open armed. "He began operating within a theatrical world," the British-born San Diego resident explained, "using the traditional dysfunctional-family play – the homecoming after a long bitter struggle with a parent in the second or third act and finally acceptance and all that nonsense. With him, though, it's never simple; he always works with opposites, with something good and bad at the same time."

Waters's remarks were illuminated by flashes of understated, conspiratorial wit, a clue pointing to his affinity for Shepard's work. "I find him terribly funny," he said with a quick, sidewise grin. "I mean, I like that level of bleakness."

Funny is not the first word I'd use to describe Buried Child, although as Waters points out, the characters are occasionally hilarious. There is, however, nothing more bleak than the death of a child, and in Shepard's play the family is condemned to a horrible, airless haunting. In the end Dodge confesses to the murder, and his grandson, Vince – after leaving for a second time – comes back to embrace his fate.

"I studied my face ..." he tells his girlfriend near the end of the final act. "As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him.... I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the windshield. I watched him breathe as though he was frozen in time. And every breath marked him.... And then his face changed. His face became his father's face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father's face became his grandfather's face.... Clear back to faces I'd never seen before but still recognized."

As surely as the bones of a buried child worked their way up from a temporary grave, Dodge, Tilden (his father), Bradley (his uncle), and then Vince walked down the path that was there, waiting. The possibility of connection with those faces lured Vince home after years on the road – he followed dreams constructed from shards of memories and need. But if dreams got him started, the ugly legacy ensnaring his family will keep him in place and decide his future.

'Buried Child' opens Wed/19, 8 p.m. Runs through July 14. Wed.-Sat., Tues/2, and July 9, 8 p.m. (also Sat., Wed/26, and July 3, 2 p.m.; no show July 4); Tues/25, Sun/23, and July 7, 7 p.m. (also Sun/23 and July 7, 2 p.m.); Sun/30 and July 14, 2 p.m., Geary Theatre, 405 Geary, S.F. $15-$61. (415) 749-2ACT, www.ticketweb.com.