Prompt 8 on Buried Child

Fun play again, huh? Well, I mean "fun" not so much in a "ha-ha" sense as a "WTF?" sense, right?

Story time: Buried Child was one of the first plays Dr. Fletcher ever taught to students. Indeed, way back in the early 00's, back when Dr. Fletcher was not yet "Dr." Fletcher, I was a Section Instructor for several semesters of Intro to Theatre class at the University of Minnesota. Now, at the U of MN, Intro to Theatre was a course for both majors and non-majors. All theatre majors had to start their coursework with Intro. It was also a "writing-intensive" course, meaning that one of the major assignments was an analytic essay (with first draft, feedback, and revisions) on a play.

Most often, the choice of plays for students to write about consisted of Joe Turner's Come and Gone (a great play by August Wilson) and Buried Child. Oddly enough, the students read Buried Child in conjunction with the textbook's section on theatrical realism.

This conjunction--realism and Buried Child--didn't really work. Students kept trying to read and write about the play as a piece of theatrical realism, and they kept running up against little bits of the play that just didn't fit.

Why do you think so?

I mean, in many ways, Buried Child is fairly realistic (again, we're talking "theatrical realism," aka "illusionism" here--not "real" as in "honest/true"). There's a fourth-wall convention. The dialogue is more or less slice-of-life (i.e., it's not in blank verse, rhymed couplets, or song). The setting seems fairly what-you-see-is-what-you-get. No characters have their "inner selves" literally hovering behind them, hissing instructions or commands into their ears.

So: realism, right? Shepard presents a plot via an illusion-of-everyday-life accumulation of surface details.

Your prompt, then: suggest some element or elements in the play that seem to run counter to the kind of presentational conventions of illusionistic realism. What makes the world of planet Buried Child so fundamentally different from the worlds of planet Trifles, planet Glass of Water, or planet Noises Off? Is what we see what we get in Buried Child? If not, where/how/to what end? (Hint: if you're confused, start with trying to find instances of irony, ambiguity, or complexity in the script. Is this a play of black-and-white, truth-and-deception realities, like a well-made play? Or is it something else?)

JF