Buried Child

In its staging of Shepard’s harrowing 1979 Pulitzer winner about the all-time worst family reunion ever, Shattered Globe Theatre strikes a delicate balance (to borrow the title of another play about a fucked-up domestic situation) between the play’s grotesqueries on the one hand and its characters’ more relatable sense of torment and alienation on the other. The temptation is to present the family’s decaying Illinois farmhouse as either a darkly funny loony bin or a surreal chamber of horrors. Neither interpretation is a stretch, given the dyspeptic patriarch moldering on the sofa, his half-lewd, half-pious wife, and their grown but stunted sons, one of whom is a petulant, one-legged bully, the other a shattered wreck who somehow keeps finding vegetables in the farm’s barren fields. To say nothing of the secret buried in the backyard.

Director Scott’s actors certainly can let ’er rip, gothicwise, when they have to (a prosthetic leg is brandished with particular relish), but they’re careful to ground the play in believable anguish. As the clan’s crumbling progenitors, Cooper and Reiter are equal parts nasty and funny, yet both also poignantly convey confusion, desperation and a pitiable sense of isolation. As the grandson who comes home to find that no one seems to recognize him, Dastmalchian likewise tempers his character’s increasingly violent identity crisis with an affecting vulnerability.

All this reality-tinged insanity diminishes somewhat the stark, almost biblical epic scale of the buried guilt at the play’s center—the family’s original sin—but it’s a fruitful and compelling take on a great play nonetheless.—Zac Thompson

More Theater