Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, the darkest, weirdest, and most twisted black comedy ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, returns to L.A., strikingly staged and stunningly performed at A Noise Within.

The homespun characters and rural Illinois setting Shepard first introduced off-Broadway back in 1978 may appear on the surface not all that different from the Kansans of William Inge’s Picnic and Bus Stop.

Outward appearances can be deceiving, however, and it quickly becomes clear that drunk-and-diseased patriarch Dodge (Geoff Elliott), his loquacious-and-loony wife Halie (Deborah Strang), their simple-minded eldest son Tilden (Michael Manuel), and their animalistic middle son Bradley (Frederick Stuart) have more in common with the loonies of Tennessee Williams’s later years or a certain 1970s sitcom couple than their Inge counterparts.

Indeed, Dodge and Halie (the latter heard only as an upstairs offstage voice until a good fifteen minutes in) could just as easily be Archie and Edith Bunker had the cantankerous Queens factory worker and his dingbat wife been a down-and-out Illinois farmer and his lost-in-space missus.

Things get even wackier when 40something Tilden shows up bearing ears of corn he swears to have just gathered from the family farm despite his father’s protestations that there’s been no corn on their land since 1935, upon which Tilden promptly covers the floor (and later his father) with their husks.

No wonder then that when Tilden’s 22-year-old son Vince (Zach Gearing) pops by for his first visit in six years, his SoCal girlfriend Shelly (Angela Gulner) thinks they can’t possibly be at the right house, and when no one seems to know who Vince is, it’s no wonder either that Shelly proposes they just keep on driving cross country.

There’s talk of Ansel, Dutch and Hallie’s deceased youngest son turned soldier, who according to his mother deserves a statue with a basketball in one hand and a rifle in the other, no matter that he met his end in a motel room rather on a field of battle.

And there’s also talk of another child, a baby that according to Tilden “just disappeared.”

If it’s not already clear, Buried Child abounds in mysteries, not the least of which is why one-time high school football star Tilden somehow turned into the village idiot during his twenty-year absence. (Perhaps it had something to do with the “trouble” he got into in New Mexico that got him “kicked out” of the state, though if you’re expecting playwright Shepard to provide clarification, or to explain what the devil it means when one character sticks his fingers down another character’s throat, think again.)

All of this adds up to a play that scores abundant laughter throughout virtually all of its hour-long first act before turning overly symbolic and surreal post-intermission.

If for that reason Shepard’s first major smash doesn’t quite do it for me as it apparently did for the Pulitzer Prize awarders back in 1979, as directed with flair by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and performed by some of A Noise Within’s most acclaimed resident artists, I wasn’t bored for an instant.

Decades of stage coupledom add authenticity to the palpable chemistry between Elliott and Strang (both equally splendid), Manuel and Stuart dig deep and with relish into bizarro brothers Tilden and Bradley, new generation A Noise Withiners Gearing and Gulner match their elders every step of the way, and understudy Bert Emmett makes the most of his moments as Father Dewis, who may be more than just Halie’s pastor.

A crackerjack design team–lighting designer Ken Booth, costume designer Angela Balogh Calin, sound designer Jeff Gardner, wig and makeup designer Shannon Hutchins, properties designer Erin Walley, and scenic designer Sibyl Wickersheimer–not only give audiences a believably run-down farmhouse and its equally run-down inhabitants but enhance Buried Child’s thematic darkness and excursions into the surreal.

Samantha Sintef is stage manager and Grace Gaither is assistant stage manager.

If the brilliance other minds have ascribed to Buried Child somewhat escapes me, there’s no quibbling whatsoever about the terrific revival it’s being given at A Noise Within. Then again, based on SoCal’s premier regional classical theater’s track record, this should hardly come as a surprise.

A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd, Pasadena.
www.ANoiseWithin.org

–Steven Stanley
November 13, 2019
Photos: Craig Schwartz

Tags: A Noise Within, Los Angeles Theater Review, Sam Shepard