Theater Review—

   Last Work By Town Players, Definitely Worth Seeing,

   Makes One Grateful For The Ties That Bind

By Julie Stern

In the immediate aftermath of the nightmare pre-Halloween snowstorm, I spied my neighbor Pam Meister trudging bravely up the road to check on The Little Theater. Nine days without power at the end of October and into the beginning of November resulted in a two week delay in the opening of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, a play about a family even more dysfunctional than CL&P’s upper management. The lack of heat and light meant that the actors, most of whom come from out of town, couldn’t even rehearse this strange and difficult play. Yet when it finally did open, Meister’s direction was superb, and the cast of seven performed with consummate professionalism.

Buried Child, which won the actor-turned-playwright the Tony Award for Best Play in 1979, dealt with what would become Shepard’s signature issues: the decline of the American Dream,  the breakdown of traditional values, and the disintegration of the nuclear family. While these themes are usually associated with Existentialists like Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco, whose works tend to be severely abstract — suggesting a sense of universal malaise — Shepard deliberate sets his plays in clearly familiar surroundings, that audiences can recognize and identify with.

Thus Buried Child takes place in the living room of a run-down farmhouse in rural Illinois that could easily be the setting for a realist drama by O’Neill or Inge. However, when the first ten minutes consisted of a fragmented exchange between grandpa huddling on the couch, and the off-stage squawking of an unseen Grandma, it brought back uncomfortable memories of a production I saw in college of Beckett’s Endgame, in which the protagonist kept his parents (Mammy and Pappy Yokum look-alikes) in adjoining garbage cans, so that when he got tired of listening to them he could jam the lids down on their heads.

The debilitated Dodge, and his relentlessly “Christian” wife, Halie, live in peculiar squalor with their two sons — the zombie-like Tilden, who has returned from a sojourn in New Mexico where he “got into trouble” and the malevolent bully, Bradley, who lost a leg in a chainsaw accident. While Halie smugly dolls herself up and goes off for a “lunch date” with her pastor, to discuss the possibility of a statue to memorialize a third son, Ansel, a soldier who died of gunshot wounds in a motel, their grandson Vince arrives with his girlfriend Shelly in tow.

Vince has been gone for six years, and decided to stop off for a visit to the old homestead, en route to New Mexico, where he expects to look up his father. As Shelly — who initially thought the farm looked like a Norman Rockwell painting, and expected Vince’s family to be similarly picturesque — tries to make sense out of things, she has the pivotal role of catalyst. Her questions, and her indignant reactions to their rudeness and bizarre behavior, leads to the ultimate uncovering of the unmentionable buried “secret” that has driven each of them off the rails.

Within this play Shepard deconstructs the most sacred myths of Mom and Apple Pie, of America as a Christian nation guided by God, of the small farm as the backbone of the nation, and of soldiers and athletes as automatic heroes. He does so with vitriolic portrayals mixed with sardonic humor.

As Shelly, Jacqueline Rowland gives a marvelous performance, trying to make sense of this weirdo family, and watching her boyfriend deteriorate into one of them. Martin Ripchick is nastily curmudgeonish as Dodge, with a voice and manner that reminds me of Alan Arkin playing a dirty minded grandpa in two movies with Sunshine in their titles.

Gary Kline and Tim Huebenthal are both excellent in their portrayals of Tilden and Bradley. Tilden like a lobotomized hulk, who fears going out of the house, and clutches Shelly’s rabbitskin coat to his cheek, while Huebenthal’s Bradley is a snarling thug who can be reduced to a quivering mass when his artificial leg is snatched away.

Chris Luongo as Vince changes in front of our eyes, from the sweet, normal boyfriend into an alcoholic brute, who grows increasingly comfortable in the midst of things, even as Shelly is anxious to leave.

Once she appears on stage and stops screeching from upstairs, Penny Gosain makes an interesting character out of Halie, morphing from the corseted, black clad church lady into a sinner in a yellow suit, flirting outrageously with a nervous Daryl Guberman, who, as Father Dewis, begins to see that he is out of his depth.

The fine acting and  deft direction kept the audience totally absorbed throughout the performance we attended. It was a very challenging task that Newtown’s Little Theater set for itself, and they rose to the occasion. If you are up for it as well,  then it is definitely worth seeing.

As Director Meister advised the audience (along with the usual message about cell phones), when you see this play you can then go home to Thanksgiving dinner and be truly grateful for the family you have.

(Performances continue weekends until December 4. See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for curtain and ticket details.

Parents should note that Shepard’s play is recommended for mature audiences.)