By Brad Rosenstein

IT'S BEEN ALMOST 25 years since Sam Shepard's Buried Child premiered at the Magic Theatre, eventually landing its author a Pulitzer Prize and recognition as one of the country's finest playwrights. Shepard found his mature voice in the play, a fusion of his early surreal riffs and an autobiographical domestic realism. What makes the play cook is a Greek classical structure refashioned by a darkly comic American sensibility: it's what might have happened if Euripides had had one too many Buds at a tractor pull.

The family's patriarch, Dodge (John Seitz), is a dying king, a rasping hulk who can barely move off the sofa or away from his television. When not presiding over the household from above, his wife, Halie (Frances Lee McCain), is on her way out for assignations with the local minister. Their sons are all broken men, from the vicious amputee Bradley (Robert Parsons) to the shell-shocked Tilden (Marco Barricelli), who is perennially bringing in vegetables from a supposedly barren field. And when Tilden's son Vince (Neil Hopkins) returns home after years of absence, he's unrecognized by his own flesh and blood. They're a bizarre bunch, but what's so funny and unsettling about the play is how accurately it evokes the ruthless and seductive tug of family ties.

This American Conservatory Theater production uses Shepard's 1995 revision of the play, which trims the language and simplifies some of the play's mysteries. Shepard may have felt he'd resolved the main problem of the play by bringing Vince into focus in this version, but alas, it's still Dodge who dominates the evening with his wry humor. Seitz never quite finds Dodge's brutal edge, but clearly he relishes the character's playfulness. Barricelli hasn't located Tilden's center yet, but René Augesen does very fine work as Vince's loopy girlfriend. Les Waters's direction is uneven, but he frequently finds the play's tricky tone of quirky sadness in addressing the big question of "what went wrong here?"

This certainly isn't a definitive Buried Child, but it's a welcome revisitation of a classic. Shepard's influence has been so pervasive, it's helpful to be reminded that he pioneered this unique fusion of surreal comedy and faded mythos. It's ironic that this new production, more or less a silver-anniversary one, should be not at the Magic but at the Geary, with the company that rebuffed Shepard when he arrived in San Francisco in the 1970s. But as the play itself posits, the world is full of ironic justice, with strange fruits blossoming in the right fertile soil.

Nuanced 'Square'

Simplicity always baffles people, and it's amusing to see the critical contortions Maria Irene Fornes's plays often provoke. Perhaps the most respected and least produced of contemporary theatrical innovators, Fornes writes plays that are as simple and resonant as fables. Her ascetic style often leaves observers panicking, certain there must be more than meets the eye, and there is, of course, but it's not a test. One of Fornes's richest plays, Abingdon Square is set in New York in the early 1900s and tells the story of Marion (Myla Balugay), a 15-year-old orphan who marries 50-year-old Juster (Christopher Herold) in gratitude but feels increasingly stifled by him as her sexual and spiritual yearnings explode.

It's the stuff of romance-novel cliché, but Fornes uses the familiar situation to sound out a world of subtextual nuance in Marion's growth to womanhood, paralleled by the period's shifting social roles for women. The staccato progression of short scenes is a Fornes signature that also creates the enclosed rhythms of Marion's existence. The cast is uneven in handling the challenges of the stylized language and its depths: Balugay has a bell-like voice and an appealing earnestness, but she doesn't yet possess the acting chops to realize all the dimensions in Marion. Herold, however, is as usual excellent, exploring Juster with subtlety and compassion.