Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a rural Illinois family beset by delusion and dysfunction is brilliantly brought to life by AstonRep Theatre Company.
Alcoholic patriarch Dodge (Jim Morley, who brought to mind Richard Widmark in a stellar performance) is permanently ensconced on the living room couch yelling to his wife, Halie (Liz Cloud). Few people could be worse caretakers for the ornery Dodge than Halie, who spends most of her days and nights upstairs, wistfully gazing at the fallow fields, remembering (misremembering?) happier days. Characters throughout Buried Child turn on a dime, but Halie is especially brutal when she turns on a dime from foggy, wistful reminiscences to acrid denunciations, thanks to Cloud’s masterful interpretation.
Buried ChildThrough 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, the Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, 773-828-9129, astonrep.com, $20
Indeed, Dodge is also under the care of his and Halie’s two sons, the lumbering and highly traumatized Tilden (Robert Tobin) and the psychotic Bradley (Rian Jairell, equally lumbering but electrifyingly terrifying). Halie’s warmth is reserved for her and Dodge’s late son Ansel, whose heroic athleticism, she maintains, warrants a statue in town. When either Tobin or Jairell are onstage, it’s nearly impossible to look away from their characters.
The ghosts of O’Neill, Williams, and Steinbeck are definitely in the air, but Shepard’s thematic preoccupations are front and center as well—decaying family structures, the inherent instabilities within masculine identity, and the expansive emptiness of the American plains. Director Derek Bertelsen and his cast and crew make a complicated drama riveting.
