UNBURIED RED-HEADED STEPCHILD
In the mid-1990s, Sam Shepard rewrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, Buried Child, for a new Steppenwolf production that director Gary Sinise dragged from Chicago to Broadway, where I saw and loathed it. It was a page-one, for-the-yokels rewrite, shrugging off the ambiguous Gothicism of the original to dress itself in frothy banter while dropping explanatory trails of breadcrumbs. Sinise’s direction abetted this farcical turn, such that the dark, heavy-handed climax jarred painfully with the trivia that had led up to it. It was a big hit with snowbirds.
Ostensibly to honor the 35th anniversary of the Pulitzer win, Bryan Rasmussen has staged a Buried Child, but the wrong one. Not the meaty, soul-searching play that won the hearts and prizes of America, but the revision that titillated tourists. This unexplained decision (does Dramatists Play Service charge less for the revision than for the original? Is the original unavailable at this season, in this city?) is rewarded with a production as disjointed as its provenance. Complicit as hell in this destruction of a classic, Sinise still did what he could to smooth the bifurcations between black comedy and bleak commentary. Rasmussen’s direction does not suggest that he is aware of these divisions, and so his flat interpretation highlights them for an ever-more-confused rendering.
The three-hour tour of an American farm family’s collapse under its crimes and the lies it tells about them, Buried Child in this rewrite and Whitefire’s staging often feels like a fledgling author’s first play. Its climactic monologues are blunt and unpoetic. Its characters, instead of the warped archetypes of the 70s version, are caricatures in service of laugh lines. In this production those laughs, during the interminable first act’s back-and-forth between a dying man (Leon Russom) and his vicious, addled wife (Jacque Lynn Colton), are not even very funny, since the director has made no choice to support or to undercut them. Like the characterizations, they’re just there, drifting inharmoniously around Christopher Tulysewski’s appropriately ugly wood-slat set.
Russom and Colton are excellent actors, as are some others in the cast; some are not; none of the good or bad work ends up mattering very much. Russom’s dry, deadly-realistic cadaver is eminently watchable, but it’s not in the same show as Colton’s over-the-top loony lady, and the same can be said of everyone on the stage. There’s no unity. One imagines the director going home after a rehearsal to say, “Well, that moment in the second act just directed itself today. Thank God for actors who make choices! It’s fun to say yes to them.” The observable direction is limited to literal symbolism: Everyone who carries anything cradles it like a baby (wink, hint, foreshadow). This is a production unwise enough to banish its audience to a 90-degree Valley sidewalk twice for scene changes that change almost literally nothing. Certainly, it never changes into a coherent show.
photos by Nico Sabenorio
Buried Child
Whitefire Theatre
13500 Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks
scheduled to end on October 11, 2014
for tickets, call (818) 990-2324 or visit www.brownpapertickets.com
