Buried Child by Sam Shepard

" I don’t want to stay here. In this house. I thought it was going to be turkey dinners and apple pie and all that kinda stuff...I’m not disappointed! I’m fuckin’ terrified!"

Shelly

BURIED CHILD

THE PLAY

"You sit here day and night, festering away! Decomposing! Smelling up the house with your putrid body! Hacking your head off till all hours of the morning! Thinking up mean, evil, stupid things to say to your own flesh and blood!" Halie

Buried Child won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play depicts the breakdown of the American nuclear family and disillusionment with the American Dream in the context of the economic slow down of the 1970s.

Buried Child is set in a decaying farmhouse in Illinois and portrays a dysfunctional family with a very dark secret.

THE WRITER

“the great majority of his plays deal with the death (or betrayal) of the American dream; the decay of our national myths; the growing mechanization of our lives; the search for roots; the travail of the family.”(Richard Gilman, Introduction to Plays 2, 1981)

Sam Shepard (1943-2017) was an American writer, actor and director. Over his fifty-year career he wrote 58 plays, among his other works. He is considered one of the greatest playwrights of his generation and his style often includes elements of surrealism and dark humour.