talk about—family, the farm, even baseball. But he is not the loving, nurturing father who knows best. ‘‘You think just because people propagate they have to love their offspring?’’ he growls. ‘‘You never seen a bitch eat her puppies?’’ His wife, Halie, is certainly no better. Though she feigns religious piety and pines for the days of traditional values, in her old age she is carrying on an affair with the family's pastor and in her younger days committed incest with her oldest son, an act that resulted in a mid-life pregnancy. This American family is definitely not the happy, well-balanced stereotype portrayed in popular media.

Shepard's use of backwoods country twang in the voices of his characters, along with images of the land outside big cities and the uncharted vastness of open spaces in America, suggest some of the country's earliest and most important myths—the frontiersman, westward expansion, and rugged individualism. Vince, initially one of the ‘‘outsiders’’ of the play, has a quintessentially American road experience late in the play that causes an epiphany that sends him back to the farm with a renewed sense of purpose. In a frenetic monologue, Vince describes how he drove all night through the rain with the windows open, ‘‘clear to the Iowa border.’’ En route, he examined his reflection in the windshield and saw his face changing into the faces of generations of his past, ‘‘every last one. Straight into the corn belt and further. Straight back as far as they'd take me.’’ Vince's experience is a reminder of the interconnectedness of individuals, families, and whole communities in America and lends the play's climax a faint glimmer of hope. As Vince assumes control of the household, and Tilden carries the corpse of the exhumed ‘‘buried child’’ upstairs to its mother, there is the sense that, through the lessons learned by mistaken generations, this family, and America as a whole, may revitalize itself, stir from the ashes of moral destruction, and rise, Phoenix-like, to soar again.

Family Acknowledging his thematic interest in the concept of family, Shepard once observed, ‘‘What doesn't have to do with family? There isn't anything. Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other—everyone is born out of a mother and father. It's an endless cycle.’’ Still, in spite of everyone's common evolution from a father and mother, the family ties in Buried Child become more twisted and significant than most people ever experience.

The play begins realistically enough, with the offstage voice of an elderly wife, Halie, nagging her semi-drunken, oafish husband (appropriately named Dodge) who lies on a lumpy sofa all day watching television. Very quickly, however, this stereotypical image of a marriage in its twilight years turns into a nightmarish vision of adultery, incest, and murder. The couple's eldest son, Tilden, has returned home after a twenty-year absence. He has been in some kind of trouble in another state and is obviously suffering from mental illness. Bradley, their second son, has lost a leg in a chainsaw accident and terrorizes his father and brother. A third son, Ansel, was, according to Halie's skewed recollection, murdered on the night of his honeymoon. His mother remembers him as the accomplished adult he never grew to be; she wants to have a statue of him erected in the town square.

Into the midst of this motley clan plunges Vince, son to Tilden and grandson to Dodge and Halie. He has returned home after a six-year absence, hoping to find the perfect, warm, and normal American family he remembers from his youth, complete with turkey dinner on the table and smiling, kindly grandparents. Oddly, though, no one seems to recognize him, though the other men of the house quickly take a liking to his girlfriend, Shelly, who has come along for the ride. The most horrific aspect of this house of horrors is the terrible secret they have kept for decades: Tilden is the father, with Halie, of the slain Ansel; Dodge, resentful and threatened, murdered the infant and buried it in the yard.

Shepard's view of family life in the American Midwest recalls some of the best-known family tragedies of dramatic literature, from the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex to Shakespeare's King Lear to Miller's Death of a Salesman. Each of these works calls upon primal urges and fears buried deep inside humanity—lust, jealousy, love, and greed—to reveal essential, if undesirable, truths about family relationships and humankind.