A Noise Within (ANW) is currently presenting Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning BURIED CHILD, directed by ANW Producing Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott. Shepard’s remarkable masterpiece will run through Nov. 23, 2019.
Set in America’s heartland, Sam Shepard’s powerful play details, with wry humor, the disintegration of the American Dream. When 22-year-old Vince unexpectedly shows up at the family farm with his girlfriend Shelly, no one recognizes him. Instead, an unraveling of dark secrets begins.
BURIED CHILD is an exaggerated view of the mechanics of family life. How many of us have been told: “What happens inside these four walls stays here”? And how many of us keep relationships with the most unlikely people only because we are bound by family ties? It seems, if you think about it, that escaping family mechanics may require death itself… or lots of alcohol! Because all of us have a version of this in our own lives, Rodriguez-Elliott says that “there’s something familiar, yet not familiar about this family. It’s at once disconcertingly recognizable and inexplicably strange.”
Written in the 1970s during a time of economic, political, and social turmoil, BURIED CHILD plunges deep into the psyche of a family consumed by the past and desperately clinging to an ideal that they lost long before. “During the time that Shepard wrote BURIED CHILD […] the recognition of addiction and mental illness was becoming more prevalent, with not enough treatment options or support to those who needed it most,” explained Rodriguez-Elliott. “The national problems of the 70s have an eerie resemblance to what we’re seeing today.”
BURIED CHILD is absorbing. It’s not what we understand as comedy, but it makes you chuckle because it’s clever and it makes you remember the quirks of your own tribe. Because of that, it hits every viewer differently and it makes for great after-the-fact conversations.
Single ticket prices for Buried Child start at $25 and are available at anoisewithin.org, by phone at 626-356-3121, and at the box office located at 3352 East Foothill Blvd. in Pasadena, CA.
Upcoming shows are:
Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 7:30 p.m. (Wine Down Wednesday)
Thursday, Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, Nov. 17 at 2 p.m.
Sunday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. (Sunday Rush)
Friday, Nov. 22 at 8 p.m. (Post-Show Conversation with the actors)
Saturday, Nov. 23 at 2 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 23 at 8 p.m.
Student Rush with ID an hour before performance $20. / Sunday Rush: Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. – all tickets remaining are $25, available online after 12 a.m. day of performance with the code SUNDAYRUSH or at the box office, cash or credit, after 2 p.m. day of performance.
Tell about the south 