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Week 10, Buried Child (1978)

Week 10, Buried Child (1978). Sam Shepard. Sam Shepard. Early plays were written in the 1960s in New York, and performed in some of the first Off-Off-Broadway spaces.

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Week 10, Buried Child (1978)

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  1. Week 10, Buried Child (1978) Sam Shepard

  2. Sam Shepard • Early plays were written in the 1960s in New York, and performed in some of the first Off-Off-Broadway spaces. • Early pieces explored themes that run through Shepard’s work: paranoia; apparently inexplicable violence, particularly on women by men; attempts to explain the causes of things, even if there is insufficient knowledge to work with; intense, almost hallucinatory monologues, which are connected and disconnected to the plays.

  3. Early influences My plays were influenced by everything happening to me. A lot of them came out of fear and anger, because that’s what was going on. There was an extreme kind of street paranoia in those days – the Kennedy trip, Malcolm X and the Panthers… everybody had the sense that there was a flood coming…I was using a lot of drugs then – amphetamines, smack. Drugs were a big part of the whole experience of that time. (In Sam Shepard: A ‘Poetic Rodeo’, by Carol Rosen, Modern Dramatists, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.42.)

  4. The American psyche ‘Experimentation was the lifeblood not only of the playwright but also of actors, directors, and even of producers and critics. The concept of “audience” was diametrically opposed to the commercial marketplace. The only impulse was to make living, vital theater which spoke to the moment. And the moment, back then in the mid-sixties, was seething with a radical shift of the American psyche.’ (Sam Shepard, ‘Introduction’ to Seven Plays, p.x.)

  5. Key events of the 1970s • April, 1970: First Earth Day. • 1973: Roe v. Wade: the case that ruled that Texas anti-abortion laws were unconstitutional. Henry Wade, District Attorney in Texas v. Norma McCorvey under legal pseudonym Jane Roe. • August 1974: Nixon resigns after Watergate scandal. • 1975: Vietnam War ends.

  6. Turning inward • The family trilogy (Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West). How would you describe the family in Shepard’s play? • What is the relationship between the natural world and the family? • What does the play suggest about the values and dangers of inheritance? • How does this ‘family play’ compare and contrast to the others we have looked at? • ‘What’s happened to the men in this family?’ What does the play suggest about masculinity and American identity?

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