Buried Child

I saw a production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child tonight at ACT. I love Shepard’s use of the American voice, well, the mid-western American voice. The principal family members were mostly detached, or insane, and watching the outsider girlfriend try to get their attention was like watching a dream, the kind of dream where nobody does what you want and they keep repeating the things that frustrate you over and over again with no forward momentum? Ultimately, the climax, or secret that the family had been sitting on, proved not as interesting to me as the way the characters related to each other, or didn’t relate to each other, and the marks left on the family by their complicity in and denial of the secret. I’m fascinated by the bonds of family, and how people who ordinarily wouldn’t even chat with each other end up living together for decades, oddly tolerant of and even blind to schizophrenic and sociopathic behavior.