Shepherd's Buried Child Mystifies and Entertains

Emerging from Buried Child last Friday was akin to stepping out of a good Dada art exhibition on the docks of San Francisco - you like what you just saw, but did not really understand it; plus, it is really foggy (excuse the tortured analogy).

It is hard to pin down exactly what Buried Child, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner written by Sam Shepherd, is about. However, this incarnation, directed by Professor of Theater Paul Moser, was unquestionably enjoyable. The acting was uneven, but several outstanding performances overshadowed the other inadequate performances. The stage and sound design, while spartan, were both incredibly effective in conveying the mood of both the first and second acts. And the story itself, while at time bewildering, is one that never became boring or predictable.

The action for Buried Child takes place exclusively in the living room of an Illinois farm house over the course of an evening and the next day. What it really concerns, though, is the lives of three generations of one family, through more than 30 years and across the country from New Mexico to New York and back to Illinois.

The play opens with 70-something Dodge (first-year Channing Joseph), the patriarch of the family, sitting on a couch watching television. He carries on a disjointed, often funny yelling conversation with his offstage wife, Halie (first-year Allison Moon). Joseph establishes himself early as one of the play's delights, deftly portraying the alternately curmudgeonly and paranoid Dodge with surprising skill. His banter with Moon was one of the play's strong points, despite Moon's sometimes heavy-handed and overwrought portrayal of the overbearing Halie.

As the play continues, the rest of the characters are very gradually introduced. Dodge and Halie's eldest son Tilden (first-year Richard Braithwaite) is from the start a shell-shocked character. Regarded by many of the other characters as a half-wit, it is obvious that Tilden is not mentally deficient, but rather terribly scarred. Braithwaite communicates this mentally guarded approach well, and delivers his often revelatory monologues in a quietly affecting manner.

While the beginning of the play focuses on the memories and internal lives of those three characters, the action moves in a proximately forward manner with the entrance of Tilden's son Vince (senior Chris Niebling) and his girlfriend Shelly (senior Blythe Phillips). Their characters at first seem a gag-Phillips the condescending city girl, Niebling the man-returned-to-his-roots. However, Niebling especially is able to overcome the initial one-dimensionality of his character, as is Phillips to a lesser extent.

The main issue that emerges is Dodge's inability to recognize his grandson Vince. This continues to an overarching theme of greater confusion which permeates every aspect of the play. The characters at times seem to exist on different planes of reality, or different realities altogether; they seem unable or unwilling to hear other characters on stage, leading Shelly at one point in the second act to smash a cup on the wall and exclaim in frustration, "I'm alive, I exist... Do you see me?"

The only character who seems able to recognize every other character and interact with them is the younger son of Dodge and Halie, Bradley (sophomore Michael Lebovitz). A bitter, vicious and angry amputee (he accidentally cut off his own leg with a chainsaw, it is explained), he is at times disturbing and at times more helpless than the feeble Dodge or distant Tilden. Lebovitz does a good job of making these extremes believable within the same character.

As the action continues through the second act, Dewis the minister (Paul Koch, an Oberlin resident and junior at Yale) is finally introduced. He comes onstage on Halie's arm and is largely ineffectual as a character. Then again, most of the play's characters are in the end ineffectual or worse, and Koch carries on his character well enough.

The play, as it reveals itself, is shown to revolve around a mostly-hinted-at family secret-the secret which drove Dodge and Hailey to their distance, Tilden to his far-off state and which eventually breaks Shelly and Vince apart after Vince descends into the emotionally and temporally confused state that permeates the house and the play. While not a flawless production, in the end Buried Child accomplishes what many plays cannot and do not even attempt - it leaves you thinking long after the final curtain descends.