Digging up Buried Child

Digging up Buried Child CHARLES G. WHITING Sam Shepard's Buried Child raises intriguing questions. There are a number of inconsistencies in the play. How to resolve them? What is the significance of the incest of Halie and her son Tilden? And what to make of the powerful finale? Does it announce a new beginning, as some have believed, or does it signify a continuation without change? Shepard's intentions in these matters and in many other elements of the play can be illuminated and clarified by an analysis of the manuscript. Examination reveals that it contains three different versions of Buried Child which precede the fourth and definitive one.' The first three versions appear to have been written at about the same time, while the fourth is separated from the others by seven months.2 By closely following the evolution of the play from state to state, we can see how Shepard's mind was working, and perhaps arrive at a keener appreciation of Buried Child in its definitive form. Comparison of the original state ofthe manuscript with its revisions confirms the importance Shepard gives to "performance" in all his plays as an alternative to realistic dialogue. It is significant that he added the entire section of Vince's "parlor tricks"to reinforce the confrontation which occurs when Vince returns after a six year absence to the family farm (pp. 95-6). In this striking sequence, Vince goes through his adolescent repertoire in a vain effort to make himself recognizable to both his father and his grandfather, bending his thumb behind his knuckles, drumming on his teeth with his fingernails, and manipulating the flesh on either side ofhis belly button to make it look like a mouth talking. It's a thoroughly visual act which catches the attention of the audience, but it is not there merely to amuse. Through these tricks Shepard revives a past now long gone and brings back before our eyes a sixteen-year-old Vince trying to get attention from his elders. They are actions which make the twenty-two-year-old Vince appear all the more pathetic in his efforts to be recognized. At the same time, the failure of Dodge and Tilden to remember him could not be more vivid, Digging up Buried Child 549 and this is the central point of the play. Buried Child is about a family whose members are "dead" for each other. In a parallel move, at the same time he was introducing this performance, Shepard removed every specific verbal explanation of the main theme. In the manuscript, in its initial form, this exchange occurred just after the beginning of the third act: SHELLY They all want to see you dead, don't they? DODGE Iam dead as far as they're concerned. They just haven't bothered to drag out the corpse yet. SHELLY Same with Vince. He's dead too. DODGE What're you talking about? SHELLY He's dead. You don't even recognize him. Tilden's dead. You're all dead. Then later in the third act, Shelly tells Halie how Vince had insisted on stopping offat every place he remembered from his boyhood (p. [[9). In the first state of the manuscript, her speech ended with this passage: Picking through his past like a broken panhandler. Searching for clues. Hunting himself. Smelling his ghost. As though the present didn't count. As though the present was shot full of holes. Missing links. Gaping wounds that wouldn't heal without a special secret fannula. Something hidden. Something hidden in people. In people he knows. People he recognizes but who don't recognize him! People who've buried him along with themselves. Side by side. The buried child of the title was thus specifically identified as a symbol not only of the "death" of Vince, but of the entire family, and for a while Shepard pursued this theme even further, linking the loveless family with the decline of a whole country. In the third act, in an insert which disappears in the definitive version of the play, Shelly said to Dodge: "There must've been a time in America when everything seemed like it...