Buried Child was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in 1978 and published by Urizen Books in 1979. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 — Shepard’s mainstream breakthrough after a decade of experimental work in Off-Off-Broadway spaces. The play brought his preoccupations (the American family as a site of violence, the Midwest as a landscape of decay, the past as a force that cannot be repressed) to their most concentrated theatrical expression.
Dodge, the patriarch, lies on a couch in Illinois drinking whiskey and watching television. He is dying. His wife Halie is upstairs, unseen, shouting down. Their son Tilden — brain-damaged, possibly schizophrenic — brings in armloads of corn and carrots from the backyard, where nothing has been planted for years. Their other son Bradley is a one-legged bully. Into this ruin arrives Vince, Dodge’s grandson, with his girlfriend Shelly — expecting a normal family reunion and finding instead a household of strangers who deny knowing him.
The play’s central secret — the buried child of the title — is gradually revealed: years ago, Halie bore a child by Tilden (incest), and Dodge drowned the infant and buried it in the backyard. The family’s entire structure of denial (Dodge’s alcoholism, Halie’s religious hypocrisy, Tilden’s madness, Bradley’s cruelty) exists to maintain silence about this founding crime. When Tilden finally digs up the child’s remains in the play’s final moments, the stage image is both horrifying and liberating: the secret is out; the family can now collapse entirely.
Shepard’s genius is to render this Gothic material in completely naturalistic language — the dialogue sounds like ordinary family conversation, with its evasions, its non sequiturs, its buried aggression — while building a theatrical structure of classical inevitability. The play is Oresteia in denim.
Collecting Buried Child
First edition (Urizen Books, New York, 1979): Trade paperback. Also collected in Seven Plays (Bantam, 1981).
Market values:
- Urizen Books first edition (paperback): $30–$75
- Signed copy: $100–$300
- Seven Plays first edition (Bantam, 1981, hardcover): $20–$50
The Pulitzer-winning play and Shepard’s most frequently produced work. Values are driven by theatrical interest and Shepard’s status as America’s most important playwright between Williams/Miller and the present.