Buried Child Background Pack Contents Childd1wf8hd6ovssje.cloudfront.net/documents/buried_child.pdfnational theatre education workpack 2 The National Theatre’s production of Buried

Buried Childby Sam Shepard

Further production details:www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Background pack © Samantha Potter and the National Theatre

The views expressed in thisbackground pack are notnecessarily those of theNational Theatre

DirectorMatthew Warchus

NT Education National TheatreSouth Bank London SE1 9PX

T 020 7452 3388F 020 7452 3380E educationenquiries@

nationaltheatre.org.uk

Background pack written bySamantha Potter, Staff Director on Buried Child

EditorEmma Thirlwell

Design Alexis Bailey

Buried Child Background Pack

Contents

Introduction 2What is Buried Child About? 4Themes within the Text 5Rehearsal Diary 9The Director: Interview with Matthew Warchus 13The Actor: Interview with Sam Troughton 16Chronology and Play Summary 19For Discussion 24Practical Exercises 25Written Work and Research 26Related Materials 27

Education

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Sam Shepard’sferocious comedy

national theatre education workpack 2

The National Theatre’s production of BuriedChild by Sam Shepard, is in the LytteltonTheatre from 29 September to 15 December2004.

CastShelly Lauren AmbroseTilden Brendan CoyleHalie Elizabeth FranzBradley Sean MurrayFather Dewis John RoganVince Sam TroughtonDodge M. Emmet Walsh

Director Matthew WarchusDesigner Rob Howell Lighting Designer Natasha KatzMusic Gary YershonSound Designer Paul Groothuis

Sam ShepardSam Shepard was born Samuel ShepardRogers III (known as Steve) in Fort Sheridan,Illinois on 5 November 1943. The oldest of threechildren, he has two younger sisters. His father

was a pilot during World War II and remained inthe forces during Sam’s childhood, and so thefamily moved about a lot when he was young,eventually coming to live in Duarte, Californiawhere they bought an avocado farm. He lefthome at the age of 16 to join a touring theatrecompany, the Bishop’s Company RepertoryPlayers, arriving in New York in 1963 to work asa bus boy and waiter. In 1964 he changed hisname to Sam Shepard and had his first twoone-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden,produced at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Boweryfor Theatre Genesis. He quickly became part ofthe emerging off-off-Broadway theatre scene.His early plays are mostly one-act, highlyexperimental pieces which were often writtenand produced in a very short time. Shepard wasa vital part of a very innovative and immediatetheatre community where improvisation was theprimary creative driving force. This influence isclear in all of his work, but most especially in hisearly plays, which are non-linear riffs on ideasrather than narrative-driven dramas. During thistime he met Joseph Chaikin whose work withthe Open Theatre was to have a stronginfluence on Shepard, moving him away fromthinking about character in a traditional linearmodel to a new way:

‘Instead of the idea of a “whole character” withlogical motives behind his behaviour which theactor submerges himself into, he shouldconsider instead a fractured whole with bits andpieces of character flying off the central theme.In other words, more in terms of collageconstruction or jazz improvisation’. (Introduction to Angel City).

His first full-length play, La Turista, wasperformed at the American Place Theatre andwon an Obie in 1967. Sam Shepard’s writingcareer has been prolific, he has written 45 playsincluding; Mad Dog Blues (1971), True West(1980), A Lie of the Mind (1985), Simpatico(1993), The Late Henry Moss (2000) and, mostrecently, The God of Hell. He has written severalvolumes of short stories and many film scripts,including his screenplay for Paris, Texasdirected by Wim Wenders, which won thePalme d’Or Award at the 1984 Cannes FilmFestival. He has also had a highly successfulcareer as a movie star, appearing in 16 films,

Introduction and short synopsis

Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff, 1983

© Ronald Grant Archive,courtesy The Ladd Company


including The Right Stuff for which he receiveda Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In1986 he was elected to the American Academyof Arts and Letters, and in 1992 he received theGold Medal for Drama from the Academy. In1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall ofFame. From November 2004, he appears inCaryl Churchill’s A Number at the New YorkTheatre Workshop.

Buried ChildSam Shepard originally wrote Buried Child in1978, and it was first produced at the MagicTheatre in San Francisco on 27 June of thatyear. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979.The text being used for the National’s 2004production is a re-drafted version of the playfrom 1996, when the play was revised bySteppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago.Shepard attended many of the rehearsals forthat production and felt the need to makechanges to the text because there were moreambiguities than he had intended, and hewanted to bring out the humour that is integralto the success of the play. He says he had gotfed up with seeing portentous Greek-tragedystyle versions of the play.

Buried Child is the second in a series of familyplays, the first of which was The Curse of theStarving Class (1976) and which also includesTrue West (1980), Fool for Love (1983) and A Lieof the Mind (1985). Shepard said that he had

tried to deny the influence of the family in theAmerican dramatic tradition, saying; ‘I alwaysdid feel a part of that tradition but hated it. Icouldn’t stand those plays that were all aboutthe turmoil of the family. And then I realized, wellthat was very much part of my life, and maybethat has to do with being a playwright, thatyou’re somehow snared beyond yourself.’

Although a work of fiction, Buried Child drawson a number of autobiographical elements fromShepard’s own family background: Shepard’spaternal grandfather owned a dairy farm inIllinois; Dodge is a Shepard family name; hisfather struggled throughout his life withalcoholism; of his several uncles, one of themdied in a motel room on his wedding night, likethe dead Ansel in the play, and another had awooden leg due to an accident when he wasten years old. Shepard writes about visiting thefarm in two of his collections of short stories,Motel Chronicles and again in Hawk Moon.Buried Child also has a number of literarycomparisons – it has echoes of Pinter’s TheHomecoming and also of Eugene O’Neill’sDesire under the Elms.

Elizabeth Franz (Halie),M.Emmet Walsh (Dodge)

John Rogan (Father Dewis),and Sean Murray (Bradley)

photo Manuel Harlan


Buried Child is a multi-layered play, rich withsymbolism and themes, and these ideas arearguably more integral to our understanding ofthe play than the narrative plot.

Identity as a Creative ActThe overriding theme of Buried Child is thestruggle between creativity and destruction.The idea of identity is explored widely within theplay (identity is discussed in more detail in thesection on Themes and Symbolism), but a largepart of the exploration is to do with the idea ofidentity being in itself an act of creativity. Thisidea is embodied by the character of Vince.Vince has left the family home, moved to NewYork where he is a musician and has created anew identity for himself, so much so that whenhe returns to his family he is not recognised.The idea of returning to the family home islinked with the idea of finding oneself and ofrealising who we are, but it can often have theopposite effect. Instead of gaining a sense ofself when we return home, we lose the identitythat we have established for ourselves in theoutside world. Home, which should be a refugeand a place where we find ourselves, becomesa place which destroys the identity we havecreated. This is exactly what happens to Vincein the play: he returns with a new identity butquickly becomes both confused and corruptedby the environment of home, and returns in thethird act a completely different person. Byaltering in this way he is then recognised by thefamily again. Everyone in the play has differentidentities at different times: Dodge, as we seehim now, has a very fixed identity, but Haliesuggests that he used to be different, ‘You usedto be a good man.’ Tilden says that he used tohave a ‘sensation’ of himself but that has beeneroded. Shelly, who enters the home anoutsider to the family with an intact identity, isaffected by the family and the house andcompletely loses her sense of identity to thepoint that she becomes totally unlike herself,symbolised by her grabbing Bradley’s false legafter expressing surprise that Dodge would dosuch a thing. By the end of the play she nolonger recognises herself and says ‘I don’t evenknow what I’m doing here’.

Creativity versus DestructionThe idea of an act of creativity being held backor even destroyed by the family, and perhapsmore importantly by genetic inheritance, isexpressed very clearly through Vince’s journeyin the play. It is a struggle which links verystrongly to the relationship which Sam Shepardhad with his own father. Everything in the playcan be said to have a link to the idea ofcreativity as a vulnerable thing which grows. Inthis sense (although there is a real buried childin the play), the Buried Child can also beinterpreted as a metaphor which represents theidea of stifled potential. The play is filled withvarious growing and creative things: the corn,the carrots, Vince’s musicianship, the roses,Dodge gives away Benny Goodman records atthe end of the play, and these really representthe idea of creativity as an indestructible force.In the end, creativity wins the war in the playbecause of the existence of the play itself. Thefact that these ideas are being expressed in aplay which is being performed by actors in atheatre is in itself an expression of creativity. Inthe play Tilden says ‘You’ve got to talk or you’lldie’. Dodge refuses to speak several timesduring the play – ‘I don’t want to talk aboutanything’ – and he dies at its end. To try andmake sense of things which are chaotic is, initself, an act of creativity. By putting thesechaotic ideas together, Shepard has bothachieved a creative act and asking the audienceto engage in the creative act of working out thechaotic elements within the play.

The play acknowledges a lack of resolution inthe fight between creativity and destruction andkeeps the idea very much alive and unresolvedat the end. In the story of the play, the battlebetween creation and destruction is lostbecause Vince succumbs to the forces ofdestruction and compromise, but in fact it iswon because of the unstoppable growthoutside. Even though there are many battleslost in the play, it still ends in a state of gracebecause despite the pervading darkness thereis an unstoppable current of creativity.

What is Buried Child about?


As well as the central theme of the strugglebetween creativity and destruction, the play isrich with many other themes and symbolism.These ideas are extremely vivid and themetaphorical level of the play is so engagingthat it is impossible for an audience not torespond to it.

IDENTITYVince’s homecoming is the central story of theplay. This introduces several ideas surroundingthe theme of identity – identity as somethingthat individuals invent for themselves; identityas a genetic inheritance; and identity assomething which is unchangeable andinescapable. Alongside these are the notions ofduality and identity conflicting within oneperson and the suggestion that identity canbecome blurred.

Vince returns to the family home for the firsttime in six years, bringing his new girlfriend,Shelly. She suggests to Dodge, whom Vincegreets as his grandfather, that Vince hasreturned partly to reconnect with the family:

‘Vince has this thing about family now. I guessit’s a new thing with him... He wants to get toknow you again. After all this time. Reunite.’

When he arrives – at the beginning of thesecond act of the play – Vince is not recognisedby either his grandfather, Dodge, or his father,Tilden. After trying several different approachesto prompt a memory from them, Vince leaves

Shelly at the house and goes into town to getDodge a bottle of whisky, saying, ‘I just gottaget outta here. Think things through by myself.’

He disappears for 24 hours (as far as Shelly andthe audience are aware he may well have left forgood), and returns in the third act seemingly acompletely different person. Wildly drunk,breaking bottles and claiming not to recogniseany of his family members, Vince breaks intothe house by forcibly cutting through a porchscreen. Dodge, who is about to die, sees thisand declares that he will bequeath the house toVince. When Shelly asks where Vince has been,he describes how he left the house intending torun, but as he drove away, he saw his facereflected in the windscreen, and inside his face,he saw his father’s and his grandfather’s:

‘Same eyes. Same mouth. Same breath.’

This notion of genetic identity, and of theinevitability of being inextricably bound to yourfamily and heritage is highlighted by Vince’sspeech at the end of Act Three. Returning to thehouse so altered, Vince creates a sense ofduality and the idea that it is entirely possiblethat the Vince in the first half and the Vince inthe second half are completely different.

On first impressions, many people believe Vinceto be the ghost of the Buried Child of the title.While we don’t believe this to be the case – andthe re-writes that Shepard made to the play in1996 go some way toward clarifying this – it isan entirely understandable reading of the story.There are deliberate echoes, repetitions andambiguous elements that highlight the theme ofidentity, but that simultaneously blur the centralstory. For example, when Tilden is asked byShelly if Vince is his son he replies, ‘I had a sononce but we buried him’. But, when Vincereturns drunk, breaking bottles and askingDodge who he is, Dodge replies ‘It’s me, yourGrandfather! Don’t play stupid with me! Where’smy two bucks?’, implying that he did know whoVince was in the second act, but was ‘playingstupid’ and pretending not to know him.

Dodge doesn’t disclose this to Vince, or to theaudience and when Vince leaves the house andShelly asks, ‘You really don’t recognise him,either one of you?’, Dodge simply replies,‘What’s to recognise?’

Themes and symbolism in Buried Child

M.Emmet Walsh (Dodge),Sam Troughton (Vince), and

Lauren Ambrose (Shelly)

photo Manuel Harlan


Many other aspects of the central story remainunexplained: there is no mention of Vince’smother; of whether or not he grew up in thishouse; and if he did live there, how long for?Neither are we told about Vince’s previousrelationship with Tilden, nor understand whyTilden doesn’t recognise him.

As well as the present tense narrative of theplay, there is also a revelation about the family’shistory at the end, that links strongly to thetheme of identity. The Buried Child of the titlerefers to a child conceived in an incestuousrelationship between Halie and Tilden. Dodge,feeling that he ‘couldn’t allow that to grow rightup in the middle of us’, killed the baby bydrowning it, and refused to admit to anyonewhere it was buried. Tilden suspects it is outback somewhere and, at the end, having spentthe entire play obsessed with ‘out back’ andwith digging up various vegetables, he finds thebody of the buried child. The last thing we see isTilden taking the baby upstairs to Halie. Theincestuous nature of this child’s birth results inconfused identity and blurred morality: Halie isTilden’s mother but also became his lover, sothe child born is both her son and her grandson;it is Dodge’s grandson and stepson; and it isTilden’s son and brother.

FAMINE VERSUS BOUNTYThe overriding visual metaphor is that of thevarious harvests that are brought into the

house. In each of the three acts of the play theharvest is characterised by a different item: inthe first act, corn is brought in by Tilden; in thesecond carrots are brought in, again by Tilden;and in the third act, Halie brings in yellow roses.In each case the item is an example of abountiful, vibrant, colourful living organism.Each act is marked and altered by the arrival ofthese brightly coloured symbols of bounty intosuch a dilapidated and unproductiveenvironment. Dodge describes the farm ashaving been mythically fruitful in the past:

‘the farm was producing enough milk to fill LakeMichigan twice over’.

Yet now, when Tilden brings in corn that heclaims he picked from ‘out back’, Dodge andHalie both dispute it is possible, saying thatthere ‘hasn’t been corn outside since about1935’. But at the end of the play Halie retractsher assertion and says ‘Tilden was right aboutthe corn you know. I’ve never seen such corn’.

The corn and the carrots, picked and brought inby Tilden, are interpreted by other characters assignificant. Halie asks, ‘What is the meaning ofthis corn, Tilden?’, and Vince argues with Shellyin the second act that ‘the carrots have nothingto do with the situation here.’

Similarly, the weather in the play seems to havesymbolic meaning. The pouring rain at thebeginning is remarked upon by Halie, Dodge,and Shelly. It continues unabated for the wholeof the first half, casting a literal andmetaphorical shadow over all of the events. Inthe second half the sun comes out and Halie,who left the house the previous day wearingblack mourning clothes, returns in a brightyellow dress with her arms full of the yellowroses given to her by Father Dewis. Halie’s finalspeech at the end of the play is spoken as theaudience see Tilden returning the buried childto her from its burial place out back. Shecomments that the farm is suddenly a paradiseof life again, which she attributes first to the rainand then to the sun.

It would appear throughout that the productivityand health of the farm are inextricably linked tothe moral health and productivity of the family.In turn, this suggests that the moraldisintegration of the family is paralleled by a

Sean Murray (Bradley),Elizabeth Franz (Halie)

photo Manuel Harlan


literal disintegration of the vitality of the farm,and that possibly, the farm stopped producingat the time the child was buried.

The ending of the play is both optimistic andpessimistic: the sun has come out, Halie feelsthe farm is essentially re-born and we see thebaby being acknowledged by Tilden andreturned to the house, presumably so that hecan grieve properly for it. Yet at the same time,Dodge has died unnoticed and Vince has takenhis place on the sofa. Halie speaks to him asthough he were Dodge, implying that the familyhas a cyclical nature. Vince, who at thebeginning of the play was attempting to breakthe inevitability of his heritage, ends the play bybeing engulfed by it.

SYMBOLS OF POWER The play opens with Dodge ensconced on hissofa, arguing with the off-stage voice of hiswife, Halie. She is dressing upstairs andcontinues arguing with him for the first 20minutes of the play without being seen. Thisimmediately communicates the power strugglebetween Halie and Dodge.

Halie has control of the upstairs of the house.Her room, which Vince goes to immediatelyupon entering the house and in which Shellysleeps overnight, is covered with pictures of thefamily and holds the emblems of the family’shistory. Both Shelly and Vince refer to thepictures on the wall and the numerous

crucifixes. When Shelly asks Dodge about thecontent of the pictures he is annoyed at herintrusive questioning yet abstains from anyinvolvement in family heritage:

‘Halie’s the one with the family album’.

Dodge has control of the living room and ofseveral symbols of power; the sofa, on which hespends the first two acts; his baseball cap,which is removed by Bradley while he issleeping and which Shelly unsuccessfullyattempts to claim when she enters the house;and his blanket, which is a highly contesteditem between Dodge and Bradley in the thirdact.

The very minimal nature of the set for thisproduction ensures that each item on the stage,and especially the contested items, has asymbolic value. Dodge’s sofa is like a throneand is a place contested by several characters.Once Dodge leaves the sofa at the end of ActTwo, Bradley usurps his father to gainpossession of it for the third act. Likewise,Tilden competes with Dodge for possession ofDodge’s whisky bottle which Tilden finally gainsby stealing from Dodge as he sleeps. Both ofDodge’s sons remove his items of power onlywhen he is weakened. It is Vince, however, whoultimately ends up in possession of all of theitems of Dodge’s power – the sofa, the baseballcap, and the house, which Dodge bequeaths tohim in his final speech.

Both Halie and Dodge bemoan the lack of realmen in the family and this is repeatedthroughout the play. Tilden and Bradley,although both grown men, still live at home andare dependent upon the support of theirparents, although Dodge asserts that he neverreturned to his parents because he was‘independent’. The family is caught in a stasis ofdependency and only when Vince returnsreborn at the end of the play does Dodge find asuitable heir.

Matthew Warchus, Brendan Coyle,

M. Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan


RELIGIONAt the start of the play, Halie makes frequentreferences to religion in her conversation withDodge. She refers to things as being Christianor not Christian:

‘It’s not Christian but it works. It’s notnecessarily Christian that is. A pill.’

Furthermore, her room is described as beingcovered in crosses, she leaves the house in thefirst act to have lunch with Father Dewis, andshe speaks with enthusiasm about her faith:

‘The messengers of God’s word are screaminglouder now than ever before, screaming to thefour winds’.

She is the only member of the family to speak ofreligion and so it appears in Act One that Halieis a religious, highly moral person. However,when she returns in Act Three, like Vince, shereturns an entirely different person. She hasbeen drinking heavily and has changed clothesfrom her black mourning outfit to a bright yellowdress. She brings Father Dewis – with whom ittranspires she is having an affair – into thefamily home and is openly aggressive to both

Shelly and Bradley. The Halie that returns is sodifferent from the Halie that left, that ourperceptions of her are greatly altered, whichchanges the way we perceive her religiousfervour.

Moreover, if we take Father Dewis to be arepresentative of the church within the play,then that representation would seem to behighly critical. When asked to intervene in whatis going on in the house, Father Dewisabsconds from responsibility several times, withexcuses such as, ‘I’ve been so busy with thechoir’ and ‘This is out of my domain. I’m in thequiet part of town.’ When he does acceptHalie’s request to intervene with Shelly, he ishighly ineffective and is, to a certain extent, afigure of fun within the play due to his lack ofinfluence or ability to accept responsibility.However he does stay until the end of the playand, apart from Vince, is the last person to leavethe house. He departs saying, ‘I thought by nowthe Lord would have given me some sign, someguidepost but I haven’t seen it. No sign at all.Just…’. He doesn’t finish his sentence, implyingthat he is in fact just human and flawed, likeevery other character in the play.

John Rogan in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan


Monday 9 August 2004First day of rehearsals. We are in a largerehearsal room at the back of the NationalTheatre building. Stage Management hasmarked out the room for us and we have a wall,a staircase and a sofa all ready to use. Theactors arrive one by one and introducethemselves. Emmet [Dodge] starts by givingevery member of the cast and creative team arare copper cent from 1932, the only year theywere made in the U.S. He says that it’s atradition on every job that he does. After formalintroductions we look at the model box of theset and Matthew [Warchus, Director] explains tous all how it will work.

We go onto the Lyttelton stage to look at thetheatre space, which is already set up for aperformance of Iphigenia that night. Emmet isworried that the circle is high and that his facewon’t be seen under his baseball cap. We alllike the space, feeling it’s the right balancebetween large and cosy. It’s helpful to see itbefore we start so we know what we’re aimingfor. Just before lunch we begin a first readthrough of the play, with the English actors

feeling slightly worried by their as yetunpolished accents. We get to the end of ActOne and then break for lunch.

We begin the afternoon with the ‘Meet andGreet’ – where the theatre staff working on theproduction introduce themselves to the castand company. In a building as large as theNational, this means lots of people: there seemto be about 50 in the room. Everyone is verynice and enthusiastic to meet us. NicholasHytner [Director of the National] introduceshimself and welcomes the cast and company tothe building. Afterwards we continue with therest of the read through and when we finish,Matthew asks what questions people haveabout the play. It turns out we have plenty, sowe spend the rest of the afternoon asking all ofthe questions that the play leaves unansweredand try to start agreeing on some answers.

Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 August These two days of rehearsals are spent talkingin a lot more detail about the play. We askthousands of questions and Matthewintroduces some fascinating ideas to answerthem. I am surprised and intrigued to learn justhow many autobiographical elements there arein the play, which are never those you’d expect– for instance, Sam Shepard’s uncle did have awooden leg, like Bradley.

Matthew is very interesting and illuminatingabout the character of Vince. He compares himto the two brothers in True West, who areessentially two sides of Sam Shepard. Hedescribes the Vince of the first half as the childwho has escaped, who has changed how heinteracts with the world, who is artistic andsuccessful; and then the Vince who returns inAct Three is drawn inextricably back to hisheritage, no different to any of his ancestors,drunk in a family who suffer from alcoholism,and in essence incapable of escape. This reallyhelps us to get a handle on the character.

Thursday 12 August We begin work on scenes today, starting withAct One. We continue talking through the text ina more detailed way and get things up on theirfeet for the first time. Emmet and Elizabeth[Halie] trained together and have been friends

M. Emmet Walsh andElizabeth Franz in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan

Rehearsal diary


for 40 years which means they have an amazingshorthand which is fun to work with. They teaseeach other something rotten but seem to have amassive amount of trust and respect for oneanother.

The full company has its first session with PatsyRodenburg, the Head of Voice at the National.We go onto the Lyttelton stage to do somevocal exercises and get used to the size of thespace and what we need to do to fill it. Iunfortunately get too near to the stage and theactors make me join in.

Friday 13 August We get on to Act Two this afternoon. Halie hasdisappeared for a section of the play and Vinceand Shelly arrive, which means that therehearsal room changes line-up and the tone ofthe play feels very different. Sam Troughton[Vince] and Lauren Ambrose [Shelly] appear inrehearsal properly for the first time and makeproceedings feel very lively. Lauren isimpressively ‘off book’ already and they bothseem to have very acute understandings of theircharacters. We work through Act Two, getting it

up on its feet. It’s quite a tricky section – muchfunnier than the first act but quite hard to playbecause each of the characters ends up in theirown world.

Monday 16 AugustThe whole company has a group dialect callwith Deborah Hecht, our American dialectspecialist who will be advising everyone on theIllinois accent. She keeps making Emmet repeatcertain words so that everyone can hear hisnasal quality, which is apparently what we’re allaiming for. She gives really helpful guidelines toplacing the voice and vowel sounds and talks alot about the landscape and sound matchingthe geography. This is a very helpful image.Everyone will have individual sessionstomorrow.

Tuesday 17 August Sean Murray [Bradley] rehearses for the firsttime wearing his false leg. He has a contraptionwhich involves strapping his left leg in a harnessbehind his body, and putting his knee into amoulded cast, to which the false leg isattached. The physiotherapist advises that hecan only stay on it for a few minutes at a timeand warns that he might not be able to walk inthe false leg at all for a few weeks. But Seangets up on the first try and speeds off aroundthe room looking like he’s had one leg for years.We rehearse the scene very quickly so as not tokeep his false leg on for too long. Thankfully, itlooks as if we’re going to be able to play thescene (Bradley’s first entrance) with Seanwearing the proper wooden leg, which is whatwe all want. We then repeat the rehearsal withSean restored to two legs and work out theacting bits of the scene.

Wednesday 18 AugustWe get into Act Three. Matthew says before westart that he just wants to sketch this actbecause it’s impossible to do it properly at thisstage. So we go through it very gently, workingout the meanings of lines and putting a verybasic staging on the action so we haveestablished what needs to happen physically.The scene will eventually need such momentumand fluidity that Matthew thinks we won’t fully

Sean Murray in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan


address it until the rest of the play is moreprogressed. I hadn’t realised when I read theplay just how funny Father Dewis is: as withother characters, when he and Halie arrive intothe world, it produces a marked change ofenergy to the scene.

Monday 23 AugustWe look at Act Two all day and in a lot moredetail. Matthew alters the staging subtly andconsistently to tweak moments, and wediscover lots more about the characters.Matthew is really good at making the blockingfluid and natural and never letting it look‘staged’. He just keeps tweaking and tweakinglittle moves, like building up multiple layers, untilwe arrive at something so subtle that you can’tremember how you got there.

Matthew has an audiotape from America ofSam Shepard reading some of his short storiesand bits of his plays and we listen to it. He saidthat he found the same process enormouslyhelpful for the actors when he directed TrueWest, as Sam has such an unusual and ratherunexpected way of delivering his own text. We

all listen to several pieces, some of which areincredibly funny and all of which have a light,subtle, almost throwaway quality to the way hereads them. It’s somewhat of a revelation. Therhythm of his delivery is surprising: it’s irregular,he often stresses a different word to theexpected one and when he gets to repetitionsof a word, he has an unusual way of sayingeach repetition as if it is a new word.

Thursday 26 AugustWe go onto the Lyttelton stage for an hour and ahalf this morning. Matthew has the actors dosome exercises in the space to get used to thesize of the auditorium and the level of clarityneeded to play it. He asks some of them to gointo the seats and some to stay on stage andplay the scenes over that distance.

In the afternoon we watch a documentary aboutSam Shepard which was made whilst Shepardwas directing his own play The Late HenryMoss, with Sean Penn and Nick Nolte in thecast. It’s very interesting to see him talking andto see how he rehearses his own play. There’salso some interesting stuff about his father andvideo footage of the two of them together. Theylook incredibly alike.

Friday 27 AugustThe first full run-through of the play – it is veryconfident for a first run-through. Everything is inplace, we have a frame and lots of time totweak and fine-tune everything. I am surprisedagain at how very funny it is.

Wednesday 1 SeptemberWe work on Act Two; Matthew gives a note toSam about Vince which sounds like a tiny detailbut means that Sam has a visible breakthroughwith the part. It is really exciting. Matthew asksSam to think about the photos we saw of theyoung Sam Shepard looking very, very cool –like some kind of a rock star – and advises himto not let Vince lose his cool when Dodgeresponds to him in an unexpected way. Laurenthinks it’s good for Shelly to have this ‘cool’persona too, so she takes the note on board aswell, which is really fruitful. It’s one of thosereally exciting rehearsals where things move onin a really good direction, very fast.

Lauren Ambrosein rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan


Monday 6 September to Friday 10 SeptemberWe’re into the final week of rehearsals in therehearsal room. We feel well-prepared alreadyand Matthew is going to do a run-through of theplay every afternoon this week. With any otherplay this would feel like a lot but with this play itfeels like exactly what we need to do, to keeprunning through, getting the framework, gettingthe journeys, and playing the whole story.

Saturday 11 SeptemberI take a first run-through of the play with theunderstudy company; in theory each of themhas to be ready to go on-stage, if needed, bynext Saturday when we start previewing, whichwould be really daunting. It’s a very good firstrun. We’re not used to rehearsing in the largespace of the rehearsal room so it feels as ifwe’re lost. However, everything is there in termsof lines and moves, and we’re in a goodposition to start some more detailed work, so ifanything were to happen they could all go on-stage, if not with full confidence, certainly withquiet optimism.

Wednesday 15 SeptemberWe start our technical rehearsals in theLyttelton. We begin the morning with a soundcheck for Emmet and Elizabeth. We’re going totry and give Elizabeth a little bit of help in thefirst scene, when she is off-stage for the first 20minutes, and lift the level slightly with someadditional amplification.

In the afternoon we start the technical rehearsalproperly and it is the calmest technical I haveever been in: everything seems to be working asexpected, and the actors are very patient andconfident. We rehearse the opening of theshow, a pouring rain curtain across the front ofthe stage, some extremely exciting electricguitars and the whole house set moving slowlydownstage with Emmet on the sofa. Everyonegets very excited. Emmet declares, ‘this is thebest entrance anyone has had since MarlonBrando in Apocalypse Now!’

Saturday 18 SeptemberWe do a dress rehearsal in the afternoon, whichis a little flat, and then a first preview in theevening. It goes extremely well, the audiencelaughs a lot, and they seem to really enjoy it.The actors all give good performances andeveryone seems happy. We’ve lots of technicalwork still left to do, mostly tweaking thetechnical parts of the play. The Lighting teamstill has quite a lot of finishing to do –understandable due to its nature. Matthewintends to do a lot of work with music andsound cues to find out exactly where they workbest.

The play opened to enthusiastic press on 29September, 2004.

M. Emmet Walsh

photo Manuel Harlan


THE DIRECTOR, MATTHEW WARCHUS [interviewed in the early stages of previewperformances]

What drew you to this play and what wereyour original ideas about it?It’s the cocktail of tones that I find very, veryinteresting – the poetry alongside the anarchyand the comedy alongside the trauma andgrimness of the play. That mixture is in evidencefrom the first line of the play to the last line. Thatconstant kind of contradiction is verystimulating because it’s interesting to direct –it’s also the sort of stuff I like to watch and it’svery much like life. In spite of the stylisation ofcertain aspects of the story, the magic realismof it, in a bizarre way its power comes from itsbeing quite lifelike. I think there is somethingabout the way the play is put together – theboldness of its style, perhaps its rule breaking,or its originality, or its daring – that is so wellachieved it gives the play an almost classicstatus now. It feels like a classic play. It wasprobably written as a rebellious play, a sort ofedgy, alternative and anti-mainstream play to acertain extent. But it’s done so well that it hasclassic dimensions that feel timeless andimportant even thirty years later.

Does having worked on other Shepard playsand knowing Sam himself inform the wayyou approach the text?

Yes. I think that when you can imagine how thewriter speaks, and how they might say some ofthese lines, it gives a window on how they mightthink about a certain exchange or some aspectof a scene, or the play. To some extent thescript is just a blank template, so knowing thespirit and personality of a writer and, literally,their tone of voice, can shed light on the variouschoices that you make as a director or an actor.Also, if you direct more than one play by anywriter you start to get a sense of who they are,what their agenda is and what their obsessionsare. Spending a lot of time in America hashelped me understand the particularity of thegeographic world that Sam is conjuring up, thekinds of people and the way of life. Even thoughthere are extremes and exaggerations, andunusual and unique things about this collectionof people and circumstances, nevertheless I’veseen where it’s coming from first hand and thatmakes a difference.

The version of the play you are using for thisproduction is the one which Sam Shepard re-wrote in 1996. How does it differ from theoriginal (written in 1978)?It is a leaner, more straightforward version of theplay. It’s still got a lot of enigma in it but therewere more obscure and enigmatic things in theoriginal and it was problematic. He (Shepard)was frustrated by people making certaininterpretations of the play – for examplebelieving that Vince was possibly a ghost of theburied child. The confusion in the earlier draftabout how and when that child died and whoseit was has been mediated slightly to make itclearer. He’s also sharpened the comedy a bitwhich is good because he loves his hybrid, heloves the unexpected comedy and I think thatthe earlier script could have been construed asbeing more straight and ‘Greek’ than hewanted. There was too much shadow originally;he’s sharpened up the playfulness of it in thecomedy.

What do you think have been the biggestchallenges for the actors rehearsing thisplay?It’s almost as though every role in the play has adifferent set of challenges; I don’t think there is

Matthew Warchus in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan

Interviews


a universal challenge. The challenge for me hasbeen to pull together all the disparate elementsand make it feel like a coherent production. Butfor the actors I suppose it has been how tomake sense of the bizarre – for example, isthere or isn’t there corn outside? Why don’t theyrecognise Vincent? What is Shelly supposed tofeel when someone is sticking their hand in hermouth? These are bizarre aspects of the playand the challenge is to make them real andplausible for the character and not just betheatrical; not to be ciphers in a story but toinhabit that grotesque and bizarre worldauthentically. I expect it is quite difficult to find away of incorporating that into your sense oftruth. You have to make certain clear choices,for example, decide whether Dodge is playingwith Vince and does know who he is; whetherhe genuinely mistakes him for Tilden or whetherhe doesn’t know and doesn’t care. So you tryand build your own architecture within it withoutwanting to normalise the play. You want to buildan architecture that is quirky, but that holdstogether.

What have been the specific directorialchallenges for you?The surprising thing was that normally I wouldknow the shape of the play and the productionin terms of pace and temperature by the timewe leave the rehearsal room. This, interestingly,would always tell me where, for example, thesound and music cues would go because theyare so much an external manifestation of thetemperature and pace. But I left the rehearsalroom still not having found all the features of theplay, its shape or temperature. In other words,some of the disparate elements are stilldisparate, more so than with any other play Ican remember. I always knew that having anaudience would make a big difference, butseeing it running with an audience, I can nowidentify where the missing elements are andadd them through previews. That isunexpected. When I read the play it felt muchmore straightforward, but perhaps because thecast have had different struggles it has kept itdisparate in a way.

A good example is that I imagined Vince’s returnwould have an extremely different vocabulary to

the rest of the play, but I found that the playstops if I do that and his return becomes anappendix. In order to keep the trajectoryemotionally arching through I will have to pullback the mise-en-scène of Vince’s return: itneeds to be much more integrated into theworld of the play. I can’t do as much withsound, lights and music as I thought might bepossible because it’s too attention grabbing. Soyou’ve got the extremity of the action and thestory: Vince comes back an entirely differentperson – which is pretty extreme – but if yousupplement or amplify that it hurls that wholesection out of reach of the audience. In otherwords what you’ve got to do is build a bridgebetween that extremity of the story and theaudience, to keep them attached to it. Youwouldn’t have known that from reading the play.

How did you and Rob Howell arrive at thedesign for the production?There were two main issues with the design.One of them was purely the logistics of placingthe important elements – the staircase, the sofaand then the doors. Considering all the differentmoves, encounters and just the spacialdynamics of it actually proved incredibly difficult– we had the staircase all over the place indesigning it. We decided that Tilden goingupstairs at the end was very important. We trieda staircase that could move, sliding into themiddle of the stage. We had a staircase thatcould slide up and down stage. The script saysthat the door to the kitchen is on the same wallas the staircase and that’s how it has been donein the past, helping certain things like Haliecoming downstairs and not seeing the corn. ButI wanted there to be a fundamental movementthrough the play – from outside, out back,through the room, to upstairs – to the shell-likeescape from out back. So that Tilden’s walkback with the baby to Halie should be a cross-stage trajectory, with Dodge caught in themiddle. To get to that point took quite a longtime and involved sacrificing other ideas. Theother issue was how visually to make aproduction that wasn’t a ‘four walls and carpet,furniture, living room’ drama from the 1950s orsomething like that. We needed something thatwasn’t simply ‘realism’ without the ‘magic’ of


magic-realism or, at the other end of the scale,something so operatic that it is difficult to laughat because it is cold, stylised and extreme. Sowe tried to find a middle way between the twoextremes. We’ve got the essence of a worldwhich is falling to pieces. Rob literally built theframe with nothing first and then added planksuntil it got to the point where it looked like itcould be half one thing and half another – halfstylised and magical, and half-real.

Why did you make the decision to not usemasking and to leave the real walls andworkings of the theatre visible outside of theroom?It was to try and honour Sam’s rock’n’rollbackground, that kind of gritty, alternative,studio theatre world. Sam is an off-off-Broadway person, the opposite to the well-made play, middle class, Broadway audience,and if you get too involved with cycloramas andmasking and things like that, then you’ve gotsomething which is very well behaved andorderly. If you just leave it in its raw state itreflects the kind of raw energy in the writing,and in the writer and his background. We didthe same thing for True West in New York, so wehad this image in our minds of what workedfrom that – the rawness and not being ashamedof seeing the lights and the backstage areas.Also I’ve always been fascinated by walking ordriving along a street and seeing a street closedoff because people are making a film. You seeall these lights around and get this glow ofincredible reality in the middle of nothing. Yousee people in costume, like a bubble of adifferent fictional reality. That’s what we werehoping to do on this island in the middle of thatspace – create a bubble.

How did you approach casting the play andhow has the production benefited fromhaving American cast members? For me, having spent a lot of time in America,it’s becoming harder and harder to approachAmerican plays without American actors. It’sexactly the same in reverse. It’s difficultwatching Pinter or Ayckbourn with Americanactors because, obviously, we only have abroad surface understanding of different

cultures and so it becomes the surface that isreflected. That might work with some plays, butit means the detail and authenticity is alwaysmissing. So it was a question of trying to castnon-Americans: the Americans were taken asread. There had to be some Americans, butcasting non-Americans became about trying tofind people that not only could do an accent,but had something about them that didn’tnecessarily feel English. It is very hard toarticulate exactly what that is. The other difficultthing is to try and make family connections, andparticularly to try and have a familial connectionbetween Vincent and Dodge when one’s ayoung English actor and the other’s an oldAmerican actor. That was enormouslychallenging.


SAM TROUGHTON, PLAYING VINCE[interviewed in the early stages of previewperformances]

Were you already familiar with the play orwith Sam Shepard’s work before thisproduction?No. I knew of Sam Shepard, but not really hiswork. I did know about Fool for Love, becausemy Dad [David Troughton] performed it here atthe National Theatre 20 years ago, but as I wasabout seven at the time, I didn’t see it. Matthewtalked about True West in the audition and thatsounded really interesting, so I had a look atthat play.

So before you started work on this play didyou have any ideas about what it would belike?Not really, I certainly didn’t think it would be asdark, as weird or as funny as it is. I suppose myexpectations were based on knowing ArthurMiller and David Mamet, but Shepard’s not at alllike either of those writers. I also thought it was

a new play, I didn’t realise it was over 20 yearsold.

When you first read the play what did youthink about the character of Vince?The first thing that came into my head when Iread the play was Jack Kerouac – particularlyhow Kerouac died an alcoholic, and how hereverted to real right wing political views like hisfather. I thought that Vince was in that area. Myother thought about him was the idea of tryingto forge your own path and eventually comingright back to where you’ve come from, which issomething Matthew talked about a lot inrehearsals. But, having said that, it’s not thatVince comes back as Dodge or as Tilden: hehas gone on the same journey, with the drive hedescribes in his speech, and he’s had the samesensation of himself that Tilden talks about, butit’s not about turning into his father. It’s not asclear cut as that.

When I first read Act Two, I thought that Vincewas a ghost. It’s not entirely wrong to think that.He isn’t a ghost, but there are deliberateconfusions in the play – for example, Shellysays to Halie ‘I came here with your Grandson’,to which Halie replies ‘My Grandson?’. That is aghost-like moment.

I also think that with all of the men in the play –in Dodge, in Tilden and in Bradley – you seewhat they are, what they have been and whatthey are going to become. You see Tilden as anold man and as a young boy, and it’s the samewith Bradley. And Vince goes through that too.All the men in the play end up being where theyare now and where they’re going to be andwhere they were at some point. It’s not blatant,though, it just happens through theperformance and is there to spot.

You’ve had to learn the accent for the part. Is it helpful or daunting to have Americans in the cast? It’s not daunting at all, it really helps becausethey’re like tuning forks and they’re alwaysthere to ask. I’ve done an American accentbefore, but working through it properly andhaving lots of lines makes it easier. If you had tocome onstage and say one line in an Americanaccent, it would be really daunting, but doing a

Sam Troughton in rehearsal

photo Manuel Harlan


whole part is much easier. It always reallyannoys me when you have to list the accentsyou can do on your CV, it’s like asking what kindof parts you can play – you don’t know until youdo them. It’s not like you spend time at homeperfecting accents. It’s really just a physicalthing that you have to spend time learning.

Is this play more difficult because it’s set in avery particular part of America?That does make it a bit harder. The naturaltendency, which we all had, was to veertowards a Southern accent because it’s muchcloser to an English one. The challenge hasbeen to master the hardness of the Illinoissound. But as you get the accent you also startto get the character – especially with SamShepard’s lines, because you have to drive itthrough and you can’t mess around. You can'tdo this play in an English accent, so it actuallyhelps.

How do you approach developing acharacter?Doing this play has challenged all kinds ofperceptions. I hadn’t done any theatre acting fora couple of years, so I was a bit nervous and tobegin with I relied a lot on other parts I hadplayed. At the start of rehearsals I played a lot ofthe internal journey of the character externally,and I went through the process of having todraw that all back in. Interestingly, Matthewcommented today that I should begin to getmore frustrated and let the lid off a bit morebecause I’m now holding back a bit too much.Everyone is different and has their own way ofapproaching a character. If you’re studyingsomeone like Stanislavski, or whoever, itsimportant to remember that that is one way ofdoing it, and you can use whatever technique isuseful. In rehearsals, if you’re allowed to, it’shelpful to start as big as possible and get asmuch out of your system at the start before youdrag it back. It’s much easier to go from playingbig to playing small than it is to go from smalland then realise that it isn’t enough. It’s good toget ideas out of your system because you avoidgetting into a run-through and thinking, Oh, Ialways thought this bit should be like this, evenif that was wrong. If you haven’t had a chance

to fail with the part, it is frustrating. I think that’show I’ve gone about it. I suppose this part hascome about without any planning. I rememberwe did a run-through and I was getting there interms of being more relaxed, keeping the lid onVince, trying to find this character, this kind ofNew York cool. (It helped to watch a video inwhich there were photos of a young SamShepard in New York, looking like the Beatles inHamburg). Anyway, I said Vince’s line, ‘Don’t bescared, there’s nothing to be scared of, he’s justold’, without thinking and did it differently. It justclicked: as soon as I said it, I thought, ‘Oh myGod, I think I’ve got it’. It’s weird, but I don’tthink I’ve ever struggled this much really. It’sreally, really different playing someone who iscompletely cut adrift by the other characters inthe play – his dad, grandad, even Shelly whenshe starts to cut carrots. Tilden says ‘you die ifyou don’t talk’. There are moments in Act Twowhen the stakes feel as high for me as an actoras for Vince the character. The play doesn’t stopfor anyone – it keeps moving on.

In his interview, Matthew said he felt thateach of the actors had very differentchallenges to deal with in this play. What doyou think the big challenge has been foryou?My challenge as Vince has been trustingMatthew’s really strong idea – which I think iscompletely right – that the Vince in Act Two andthe Vince in Act Three are completely differentcharacters. That doesn’t mean that I play themconsciously as completely different characters– of course they’re the same person – but it’sabout getting the separation and beingconfident with it so that they are at oppositeends of the scale. The challenge has been tokeep the powder dry before Act Three. Off thepage, structurally, it’s quite clear what is meantto happen; where the highs and lows are, wherethe gags are, and the challenge was to learn tonot to play that, but to have an Americanattitude with it. The action of the play is a puzzlebecause how you read it and how you play it arecompletely different.


Were you able to do any preparation orresearch?Sort of, but it was all a bit by accident. I listenedto a lot of American music, like Neil Young and70s American music, and I listened to theAmerican comedian Bill Hicks, who has got theright rock’n’roll attitude for playing Shepard.That was a bit of a coincidence though,because I’d just been into that stuff for the lastcouple of years. I read some of Sam Shepard’sshort stories, and Matthew gave us a tape ofhim reading his own writing. I wasn’t sure that Iwanted to hear the tape at first, as it wouldn’tnormally be very helpful, but it really was withthis play. It teaches you that the attitude he hasis peculiar to him. Everything helped. Oh, and Idid buy some saxophone music which was acomplete waste of time: it was no help at all.

How has your understanding of thecharacter of Vince developed during therehearsal period?I think he’s become more confident. I’ve had toplay one thing rather than the four or five thingsit could be. At the beginning of rehearsals I wasplaying Vince a bit too tentatively. I was trying tobring in too many ideas about what he was likewhen he was younger, and that was a problembecause there are so many things we don’tknow. For example, who is Vince’s mum? I don’treally know. I imagine Tilden was probably withsomeone like Shelly, but it’s not reallyimportant. Did he live in the house? How longwas he with Tilden as a child? I found that to be,not a waste of time, but it doesn’t help. I had topick one thing rather than to worry abouteverything.

What is distinctive about the way thatMatthew directs?He is really patient, very cool and chilled out. Hetends to let the play run a lot until it’s tied itselfup in knots, and then he’ll untangle it. I’ve neverrun a play so much, but it’s been really goodwith this play and probably would be withShepard in general. I would be really interestedto work with Matthew on a different type of playjust to see how differently he worked. I think theway he has directed this play has been quiteamazing: the play has sort of dawned on

everybody at pretty much the same time. Withtwo weeks to go I probably still didn’t reallyhave a clear way through, knowing what wasgoing to happen. Matthew has never definitivelydefined anything; he has stopped us fromdefining moments, which has worked really wellfor this play.

Is there any part of the play which you findparticularly difficult?Yes, walking upstairs in sunglasses withcowboy boots on, quickly. That’s difficult.


Sam Shepard has written 46 plays, 11 of whichhave won Obie Awards, and has appeared asan actor in 16 films.

1943 5 November: born in Fort Sheridan,Illinois.

1961 Leaves school and starts training inanimal husbandry.

1963 Moves to New York and works as abusboy at a nightclub in GreenwichVillage.

1964 Premieres of Cowboys and The RockGarden at Theatre Genesis; and Up toThursday at Village South Theatre.

1965 Dog and Rocking Chair at Café La MaMa;Chicago at Genesis; Icarus’s Mother atCaffe Cino.

1966 Red Cross at Judson Poets’ Theatre;Fourteen Hundred Thousand atFirehouse Theatre, Minnesota.

1967 La Turista at the American Place Theatre;Melodrama Play at La MaMa; Cowboys 2at Mark Taper Form, LA; Forensic and theNavigators at Genesis.

1968 Touring as a drummer with Holy ModalRounders; records ‘The Moray Eels Eatthe Holy Modal Rounders’.

1969 The Unseen Hand at La MaMa.1970 Operation Sidewinder at Lincoln Center.1971 The Mad Dog Blues at Genesis; Cowboy

Mouth (written with Patti Smith) and BackBog Beast Bait at the American PlaceTheatre.

1972 The Tooth of Crime has its premiere at theOpen Space, London.

1974 Premieres of Geography of a HorseDreamer, directed by Shepard, at RoyalCourt Theatre Upstairs, London; LittleOcean at Hampstead Theatre Club(directed by Stephen Rea); Action atRoyal Court Theatre Upstairs.

1975 Joins Bob Dylan’s Rolling ThunderReview tour as writer of a proposedscreenplay.

1976 Angel City at Magic Theatre; Suicide in B-Flat at Yale Repertory Theatre; The SadLament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of KillingHis Wife at Bay Area Playwrights’Festival.

1977 Premiere of Curse of the Starving Class atRoyal Court Theatre; Rolling ThunderLogbook published.

1978 Seduced at Trinity Square RepertoryTheatre; 27 June Buried Child at the MagicTheatre, San Francisco, winning PulitzerPrize for Drama the following year;Steppenwolf premiere a revised versionof Buried Child in 1995, directed by GarySinise, which transfers to Broadway thefollowing year.Shepard makes film debut in Days ofHeaven.

1980 True West premiere at the Magic Theatre(staged by the NT in the Cottesloe, 1981,directed by John Schlesinger, with BobHoskins and Antony Sher; and at theDonmar (in co-production with WestYorkshire Playhouse) in 1994, directed byMatthew Warchus, with Mark Rylanceand Mike Rudko alternating roles. Thisproduction is staged at the Circle in theSquare in New York in 2000, with PhilipSeymour Hoffman and John C Reillyagain alternating roles). Buried Childstaged at Hampstead Theatre.

1982 Motel Chronicles, a prose collection,published. Steppenwolf revive True Westwith John Malkovich and Gary Sinise(later televised on PBS). Appears in thefilm Frances with Jessica Lange.

1983 Fool for Love premiere at the MagicTheatre, directed by Shepard; staged by

Sam Shepard – in context

Antony Sher and BobHoskins in True West,

NT 1981

photo Nobby Clark


the NT in the Cottesloe, 1984, directed byPeter Gill, with Julie Walters and IanCharleson; film version 1985, directed byRobert Altman, with Shepard and KimBasinger. Shepard appears in the film The RightStuff, receiving Oscar nomination as BestSupporting Actor.

1984 Paris, Texas, screenplay by Shepard,directed by Wim Wenders, wins Palmed’Or at Cannes.

1985 A Lie of the Mind at Promenade Theatredirected by Shepard, wins New YorkDrama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.

1986 Elected to the American Academy of Artsand Letters

1988 Shepard directs his screenplay Far North.1991 States of Shock at American Place

Theatre.1994 Simpatico at Joseph Papp Public

Theatre, directed by Shepard. The 1999film of Simpatico, with Jeff Bridges, NickNolte, and Sharon Stone, and Shepard isdirected by Matthew Warchus.Shepard is inducted into the Theatre Hallof Fame.

1998 Eyes for Consuela at Manhattan TheatreClub.

2000 Shepard plays the Ghost in a film versionof Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, directed byMichael Almereyda.

The Late Henry Moss opens at the MagicTheatre, San Francisco, directed byShepard.

2001 NY premiere of The Late Henry Moss. 2004 This So-Called Disaster, a film directed by

Michael Almereyda, about the rehearsalperiod for The Late Henry Moss in SanFrancisco, is released.The God of Hell New School UniversityTheatre, Greenwich Village, from 29October, with Randy Quaid, J SmithCameron, and Tim Roth.November, Shepard appears in New Yorkpremiere of Caryl Churchill’s A Number.

Julie Walters and IanCharleson in Fool for Love,

NT 1984

photo John Haynes


Buried Child is set on a dairy farm in Illinois in1978. There is a single set for the entire play –the living room of the farmhouse.

Act OneIt is raining heavily. Dodge sits on his sofawatching TV; he smokes often and has a whiskybottle stashed under the sofa seat. He coughsviolently until Halie, his wife, tells him fromupstairs (offstage) to take a pill to stop hiscoughing. Halie asks whether Dodge iswatching baseball on the TV – she says that it’snot Christian to watch baseball on a Sunday.She remembers once going to the horse raceswith a breeder man on a New Year before sheand Dodge were married, which makes Dodgejealous. She says she is going out to lunch withFather Dewis and that he should ask for Tilden ifhe wants anything, as he is the eldest child.Dodge coughs again and calls for Tilden.

Tilden enters from the kitchen with his arms fullof corn cobs. Dodge asks where it came from,as there hasn’t been any on the farmland since1935. Tilden claims the back yard is full of corn.He gets a stool and pail and husks the corn

whilst Dodge watches TV. Halie (still from offstage) says that she and Dodge will have to lookafter Tilden, as he is like a child; neither he norBradley can look after themselves. Had Ansel,the smartest of her sons, been alive he wouldhave earned well enough to look after hisparents. Halie comments that if Ansel hadn’tmarried into a Catholic family he’d probably stillbe alive – nor was it fitting that he died in amotel room.

She comes downstairs dressed in blackmourning clothes and leaves money on thekitchen table in case Dodge needs anythinglater. She is annoyed at the scattered cornhusks and when Tilden says that he picked itfrom out back, she repeats Dodge’s assertionthat there isn’t any corn, and suspects he eitherstole or bought it. Tilden cries.

Halie tells Dodge that Bradley will visit later tocut his hair, but Dodge objects, saying his hairdoesn’t need cutting and Bradley doesn’tbelong in the house. Halie reminds him thatBradley is Dodge’s flesh and blood and heshouldn’t say such things. Halie is visiblyshaken when Dodge replies that his flesh andblood is buried in the back yard. As she leaves,she asks Dodge to stop Tilden going outside inthe rain.

Dodge changes the subject when Tilden askswhy he said his flesh and blood is buried in theback yard. Dodge starts to coughuncontrollably when Tilden starts to go outside,so his son gives him some water and lays himon the sofa. When Dodge falls asleep, Tildensteals his whisky, covers his father with the cornhusks and goes back outside. The one-leggedBradley (who cut off his own leg), enters, seesthe corn, goes to Dodge, takes out a pair ofclippers and starts to cut his hair.

Act TwoLater that night, it is still raining heavily. Vince,the grandson of the family, arrivesunannounced with his girlfriend, Shelly. Theypresume the darkened house is empty. Vincegoes upstairs to look for Halie while Shelly waitsdownstairs. Dodge wakes up and she starts toexplain why she is there, but he doesn’trespond. Vince comes back downstairs and

Play summary

Brendan Coyle

photo Manuel Harlan


sees his grandfather but Dodge doesn’trecognise him: at first he thinks Vince is Tildenbut later says that Tilden is looking after him.

Dodge realises that his whisky has gone andstarts shouting and pulling the cushions off thesofa. Shelly is unnerved and tells Vince that shewants to leave, but he grabs her to force her tostay. They struggle and as Vince falls to thefloor, Tilden appears in the kitchen doorway, his arms full of carrots.

Tilden does not recognise Vince and does notanswer Shelly’s question about whether he isVince’s father. She offers to hold the carrots, but Tilden suggests they could actually cut andcook them, and goes to get a stool and a knifewhen she agrees. Annoyed, Vince asks Shellyto help him and not get involved with cuttingcarrots, but she starts, and Tilden watches her.Dodge is determined that someone will get hima new bottle of whisky before Halie comesback. Vince – incredulous that Tilden stilldoesn’t recognise him – tries to jog Dodge andTilden’s memories by performing some of hischildhood party tricks. But it doesn’t work, soVince agrees to go into town to get the whisky.Shelly is distressed at the idea of being leftalone with Tilden and Dodge, but Vince insistson going. He takes the money from the kitchentable and leaves.

When Shelly asks again if either of themrecognises Vince, Dodge replies “what’s torecognise?”, and turns back to the TV. Tilden is

fascinated with Shelly’s rabbit fur coat, so shelets him stroke it and offers it to him. He startsto tell her about a tiny baby that went missing,but Dodge tries to stop him and, doing so, fallsto the floor. Tilden forcibly stops Shelly fromrunning away, saying that Dodge is the onlyperson who knows the location of the baby.Bradley appears and asks Shelly if she is withTilden. He is so intimidating towards both ofthem that Tilden runs out of the room, leavingBradley alone with Shelly. He forces her to openher mouth, and he slides his fingers in andholds them there to the end of the scene.

Act ThreeNext morning, the sun is out. Bradley sleeps onthe sofa and his wooden leg is on the floorbeside it. Dodge is sat against the TV on thefloor. Shelly has made some beef bouillon forDodge, but he refuses to drink it. Shelly admitsthat she was so frightened of Bradley that shehid outside until he was asleep and then creptupstairs to sleep in Halie’s room. She asksDodge about the pictures there but he seemsnot to know about them.

Halie and Father Dewis arrive. Halie now wearsa bright yellow dress, her arms are full of yellowroses, and they are both quite drunk and giggly.Dodge hides under Shelly’s coat, insisting thatshe doesn’t leave him alone with them. Halie isembarrassed by the state of the house andapologises whilst removing Shelly’s coat fromDodge and draping it over the wooden leg.Dodge claims to be cold without the coat, soHalie removes the blanket from Bradley to giveto Dodge. This wakes Bradley and he demandshis blanket back. Halie slaps him, then turns herattention aggressively to Shelly to ask what sheis doing in the house. Without giving her time toreply, Halie realises that Tilden is missing andstarts to look for him. But Shelly is upset andgrabs Bradley’s leg to gain attention. Halie goesto call the police to get rid of Shelly, but Bradleydoesn’t want police in the house. When Shellyaccuses the family of taking their affairs outback to settle their problems, Halie tells her toshut up.

Dodge decides to tell Shelly the family secret,despite objections from Halie and Bradley. Hereveals that Halie had a baby long after the

Brendan Coyle (Tilden),Lauren Ambrose (Shelly)

photo Manuel Harlan


other boys were born and after they hadstopped sleeping together. He let her give birthto the baby without any medical help, yet thechild lived. He implies that the child wasconceived in an incestuous relationshipbetween Tilden and Halie, and so he killed thebaby by drowning it. Halie denounces this aslies.

Suddenly Vince bursts on to the porch, drunk,throwing glass bottles and shouting at thepeople inside. Shelly and Halie try to speak tohim without success. Vince now claims not torecognise anyone. Halie and Father Dewis goupstairs, Halie remembering what a lovely childVincent was. Shelly puts down Bradley’s legand tries to go out and persuade Vince to leave,but he yells at her to stay inside and cutsthrough a window screen to enter the house.Bradley slides off the sofa and crawls towardshis leg. Dodge starts to declare his will, leavingthe house to Vince. Vince refuses Shelly’s pleasto leave, saying that he has just inherited ahouse. She leaves alone. Vince tormentsBradley with his leg, making him follow it out of

the house and shuts him outside. Father Dewisadvises Vince to go upstairs and see hisgrandmother. Vince refuses and Father Dewisalso leaves. Dodge has died unnoticed. Vincecovers him with the blanket and places theyellow roses on him. He puts on Dodge’s capand lies down on the sofa. Halie starts to talkfrom upstairs to Vince, presuming that he isDodge, and tells him that Tilden was right thatthe backyard is full of vegetables and the sun isout. Tilden appears at the kitchen door holdingthe remains of the baby buried in the back yard.He walks across the room and up the stairs,towards Halie.

Elizabeth Franz (Halie) JohnRogan (Father Dewis), and

Lauren Ambrose (Shelly)

photo Manuel Harlan


1. During rehearsals for Buried Child we spenta lot of time talking about the questionswhich go unanswered in the text and tried towork out satisfying answers to them basedon the definite information we did have. Tryto identify 20 key questions that gounanswered in the play and talk about howyou might answer those questions.

2. The theme of identity is very strong in BuriedChild. How and where does it arise in the textmost prominently and what do you thinkSam Shepard’s feelings are about identity?

3. Religion and morality are both themes in theplay. What do you think the author’s viewsare on these subjects?

4. Discuss the importance of entrances inBuried Child. How does the writer useentrances in different ways and whathappens to the shape of the play when eachentrance occurs?

5. Discuss what the symbolism of the corn,carrots, yellow roses and the weather couldbe.

Brendan Coyle (Tilden),Lauren Ambrose (Shelly)

photo Manuel Harlan

For discussion


1. Look at the various speeches towards theend of the play which Dodge, Vince andShelly give. Try doing those speeches in thefollowing ways;a) As written, observing the punctuation.b) With no punctuationc) Using the word ‘I guess’ in addition to the

speech where you feel it fits.d) Using the name of whoever the person is

speaking to in addition to the textwherever you feel it fits.

2. Improvise scenes which are not in the play,for example;a) Halie and Father Dewis’s lunch the

previous dayb) Shelly and Vince’s car journey from New

York to Illinois (about 6 hours’ drive)c) What happened between Shelly and

Bradley at the end of the first half?

3. In groups of four, stage the section of ActTwo which begins when Tilden arrives in theroom with his arms full of carrots and endswhen Vince leaves to get the bottle of

whisky. Pay particular attention to the rhythmof the writing and which moves are essential.Bear in mind that the reason the scene iscomic is because each of the four charactershas a totally different agenda. What do youdiscover from staging this section?

Lauren Ambrose (Shelly),M.Emmet Walsh (Dodge)

photo Manuel Harlan

Practical exercises


1. Geographical location and lifestyle areincredibly important factors in understandingthis play. Find out what you can aboutIllinois’ geography and rural farmingcommunities there. Also, Tilden says he hasspent time in New Mexico. What is it like andhow far is it from Illinois?

2. In the play, both Dodge and Halie say thatthere hasn’t been corn on the farm sinceabout 1935. There is an historical reason thatcould explain why an Illinois farm would stopproducing corn in 1935 – try to discoverwhat that is.

3. Read Sam Shepard’s Curse of the StarvingClass and True West. What similarities dothese plays have to Buried Child? What arethe recurring themes in all three plays?Compare the character of Vince to the twobrothers in True West. What themes are bothplays expressing?

4. Read the original text of Buried Child from1978 (included in Sam Shepard: Plays 2,

Faber and Faber) and then read the re-written version of the play from 1996. Look inparticular at the changes in Act Two. In whatways has the play altered? How do the re-writes affect an audience’ understanding ofthe play? Can you find specific examples ofhow small changes to phrasing change yourunderstanding of the play?

Elizabeth Franz

photo Manuel Harlan

Written work and research


FILMSParis, Texas (1984) written by Sam Shepard,directed by Wim WendersFool for Love (1985) written by Sam Shepard,directed by Robert AltmanSimpatico (1999) written by Sam Shepard,directed by Matthew Warchus

BOOKS‘Sam Shepard’ by Martin Tucker (Continuum Publishing)‘The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis’by Stephen J. Bottoms (Cambridge University Press) ‘Cruising Paradise’ by Sam Shepard (Vintage Books)‘Great Dream of Heaven’ by Sam Shepard(Vintage Books)‘Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon’ by Sam Shepard (Faber and Faber)‘Sam Shepard: Plays 1’ by Sam Shepard(Metheun)‘Sam Shepard: Plays 2’ by Sam Shepard (Faber and Faber)‘Sam Shepard: Plays 3’ by Sam Shepard (Faber and Faber)The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard(CUP)

The National Theatre’s programme for BuriedChild is on sale at £2·50 from the NT Bookshop.It contains a specially commissioned article onSam Shepard by Christopher Bigsby – ‘Cruisinga Tainted Paradise’; quotes from Shepardhimself and a chronology of his life and work;full details about cast and creative team; andmany photographs – of the author, thecountryside of the play, of past productions ofSam Shepard at the National, and of the cast inrehearsal.www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/bookshop

Lauren Ambrose

photo Manuel Harlan

Related material

Documents

Buried Child Background Pack Contents Childd1wf8hd6ovssje.cloudfront.net/documents/buried_child.pdfnational theatre education workpack 2 The National Theatre’s production of Buried