2008 SEASON

Overview | Mr. Marmalade (April 4 – May 3) | In the Garden (May 30 – June 28) | Freakshow (July 25 – August 23) | Buried Child (September 26 – October 25) | Lord of the Burgeoning Lumber (November 20 – December 20)

BURIED CHILD
by Sam Shepard
directed by Clyde Simon

September 26 – October 25

Cross the threshold into the heart[land] of America.

Winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, this powerful and brilliant play probes deep into the disintegration of the American Dream.  The setting is a once Norman Rockwell-esque, but now squalid farmhouse occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence.  The inhabitants are a cantankerous whiskey-swilling grandfather; a pious grandmother who goes on drinking binges with the local minister; and their sons: Tilden, a former All-American footballer who’s now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw.  Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the lunacy into which she is suddenly introduced.  The family harbors a dark, tightly-held domestic secret, which Shelly  probes to unravel, while mysterious crops suddenly start to appear out back in the fields.

Artistic Director Clyde Simon, an affirmed Sam Shepard enthusiast (previous convergence productions include Shepard’s The Unseen Hand,  Action, La Turista, States of Shock) directs. With Buried Child hetakes a fresh look at Sam Shepard’s magical and mysterious contemporary classic, an American family saga that jolts between domestic humor and gothic horror.