Theater Review: 'Buried Child,' the Parish Players 

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• Courtesy Of Ray Chapin
• From left: Erik Gaetz, Julianne Borger and Alan Gelfant

Sam Shepard's plays feature symbolism and lyrical language, but his plots and settings are distinctly down-to-earth. His hallmark might be depicting an absolutely average day that somehow becomes a character's breaking point. In Buried Child, an entire family unravels, but the patriarch never leaves the couch and an errand to get a bottle of whiskey takes all night. A strong production by the Parish Players at the Eclipse Grange Theater in Thetford captures Shepard's savage blend of the prosaic and the profound.

Shepard began writing experimental plays in the 1960s, and his career took off with the premiere of Buried Child in 1978. The play won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Revived by an artistically ambitious community theater group, it remains compelling.

To portray the breakdown of the American family, Shepard constructs an especially odd one and studs it with strange behaviors and a hyperbolic history that seems to flutter between truth and illusion. Seventysomething Dodge and 60-ish Halie have a farm in Illinois where they claim nothing has grown for the past 40 years. Their two stunted sons are incapable of carrying on the farm or caring for their parents. Emotionally damaged Tilden has returned home in middle age. Bradley lost his leg in a chain saw accident, and his only joy is bullying his family members.

Vince, Tilden's son, arrives with his girlfriend, Shelly, to find that his father and grandfather don't recognize him. The family harbors a dark secret that seems both metaphysical and starkly real. Shepard leaves the play's meaning ambiguous while firmly conveying that the family has sustained mortal damage.

Buried Child is set during the agricultural depression of the 1970s, but Shepard expresses the challenges of the time surrealistically. Tilden enters with his arms full of fresh corn, a mysterious outburst of fecundity in a world the family treats as bleached dry. It's raining, and Tilden and the green corn are soaked. Nothing fits, nothing belongs. Then, as his parents bicker, Tilden sits on a milking stool in the living room, shucking corn and tossing the husks on the living room carpet. As the viewer sinks into this strange world, the story seems to throb with meaning.

Shepard's storytelling is evasive, mirroring the inability of his characters to face events. Halie is bitter about her youngest son's death "in a motel room" and equally bitter about his marrying a Catholic woman. She still talks about the foreboding she felt when he left on his honeymoon. While the manner of his death remains unsaid and we're never explicitly told he was killed by his new bride, murder seems to waft up like smoke.

Throughout, characters tell pieces of stories, but they almost never include the main action. The audience is left with a sense of grief so large that they're forced to imagine that the story ends in an event equally big. The play's title is teased throughout. Is a child buried in the field out back? Is the child the result of incest or an affair? Or is the child an idea, a symbol of the death of the American family?

Director Ray Chapin never asks viewers to latch on to an answer, and one can argue that in the rainy world of the play, answers aren't possible any longer. But deep themes abound. Chapin is impressively true to Shepard's open-ended, poetic style, letting the sheer weight of the characters' struggles suggest truths too big to be pinned down.

As Dodge, Alan Gelfant embeds the character in the couch, in his hacking cough, in strands of the past. Gelfant lets Dodge twitch with disillusionment in a rich performance that conveys needs blunted by the sad shape of his life.

As Halie, Kay Morton nags Dodge with sharpshooter precision, then advances an account of past grievances with biblical majesty. In Morton's hands, Halie is always right, even when she stumbles home tipsy after a night carousing with a pastor.

Erik Gaetz plays Tilden as a man anchored in stillness, keeping his gaze locked on others. The play contains several of Shepard's beautiful, spacious monologues. Gaetz makes Tilden's description of driving a highlight of the production, his face open to the memory of yearning.

Playing the outsider Shelly, Julianne Borger has a simple job, at first, of letting the strange family confound her. But soon Borger settles in to reveal a character oddly comfortable with peeling carrots in a living room, while Tilden is compelled to touch her rabbit-fur jacket as if she might be a wild animal herself. Borger makes each of Shelly's many transitions stunningly clear.

Rounding out the solid cast are Noor Taher as the brutal, one-legged Bradley; Malcolm Quinn Silver-Van Meter as the grandson trying on his grandfather's alcoholism and emotional distance for size; and Jim Schley as the reverend quick to flee from trouble.

Chapin has steered the actors to maintain an absorbing and unified tone that delicately avoids some pitfalls. The production is serious but never grim, taut but never histrionic. Humor percolates through the dialogue and action. Shepard doesn't want easy pity for his characters, and Chapin lets each of them manifest a strange and earnest courage to be who they are.

The set and costumes give the play the meticulous realism Shepard liked to use as he demolished sentimental veneration of the American dream.

As Dodge the patriarch crumbles, the story becomes that most masculine kind of drama: a power struggle. But the tools and stakes in Buried Child are bizarre. Though it's always clear who's winning, the lead changes awfully fast until Vince proclaims himself the obvious heir to a tattered heritage. "I've gotta carry on the line," he says with casual confidence. "I've gotta see to it that things keep rolling." What an eerie project that will be.