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Title: Buried Child by Sam Shepard ISBN: 0-8222-1511-X Publisher: Dramatist's Play Service Pub. Date: February, 1997 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $6.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: All portent, no payoff
Comment: Sam Shepard's 1995 revision of his play that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 builds tension for two acts and dissipates it in the third. If it is "symbolic," the symbols are opaque. There is the trademark Shepard old crank (Dodge), sons who don't get along (Tilden and Bradley), outbreaks of smashed crockery, and a young man unsuccessfully seeking recognition (Vince). There is also a blatantly unfaithful wife (Halie) and a nervous younger woman (Vince's girlfriend Shelly). Their ennui and ambivalences are on the family's "old home place" in Illinois rather than in a desert that mirrors the desolation of the fissioned nuclear family.
The play can be read(/performed) as comedy rather than existentialist tragedy, especially since it sputters out rather than achieving catharsis. ... the third act of "Buried Child" would be better if Shelly established her dominance rather than Vince inheriting the place after Dodge's (perhaps unreliable) confession.
Rating: 4
Summary: All portent, no payoff
Comment: Shephard's 1995 revision of his play that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 builds tension for two acts and dissipates it in the third. If it is "symbolic," the symbols are opaque. There is the trademark Shephard old crank (Dodge), sons who don't get along (Tilden and Bradley), outbreaks of smashed crockery, and a young man unsuccessfully seeking recognition (Vince). There is also a blatantly unfaithful wife (Halie) and a nervous younger woman (Vince's girlfriend Shelly). Their ennui and ambivalences are on the family's "old home place" in Illinois rather than in a desert that mirrors the desolation of the fissioned nuclear family.
The play can be read(/performed) as comedy rather than existentialist tragedy, especially since it sputters out rather than achieving catharsis. It seems to me that Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming" is a more effective vision of a similar return "home" to a viper's next and that the third act of "Buried Child" would be better if Shelly established her dominance rather than Vince inheriting the place after Dodge's (perhaps unreliable) confession.
Rating: 4
Summary: A two-fold level in Buried Child
Comment: There might be some people who tend to think of Buried Child as an elusive play, for there are a lot of actions they don't quite understand. Nevertheless, I think something is weird because Shepard's focus is not simply on the realistic level, but on the symbolic level as well. The backyard in this play, for one, is conveying this two-fold level. On the one hand, it is physically a backyard as many people have in real life. It is, on the other, a mysterious place inasmuch as there is no detailed description of the place, yet a few significant events all so happen to take place at the backyard. That is, growing crops and burying the child is all relating to the backyard. In my opinion, there are many other actions and events that have such a two-fold meaning in this play.
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Title: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry ISBN: 0679755330 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 November, 1994 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Roosters. by Milcha Sanchez-Scott ISBN: 0822209659 Publisher: Dramatist's Play Service Pub. Date: January, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.50 |
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Title: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson ISBN: 0452265347 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: December, 1990 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Death of A Salesman by Arthur Miller ISBN: 0140481346 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 06 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams ISBN: 0451167783 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: August, 1989 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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