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Buried Child Buried Child. By Sam Shepard. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago. 4 October 1995.
Steppenwolf co-founder Gary Sinese chose to direct Buried Child for the theatre's twentieth-anniversary season with the hope that he could make minor line changes in the script. Discussions with Shepard revealed the playwright's interest in making a few additions, so Sinese invited him to work on them with the Chicago cast. Shepard arrived with a manuscript covered in red ink that suggested he had been thinking about a revision for some time, and Steppenwolf thus opened its anniversary season with the world premiere of Shepard's revised Buried Child. The new script has replaced the first as the authorized version of the play. That Shepard felt compelled to revise a Pulitzer Prize-winning play many consider a masterpiece of American theatre undoubtedly will inspire debate about the first version of the play in particular and the nature of a theatrical text in general.
The revision presented in the Chicago production seemed not so much to alter the whole as shift focus, placing greater emphasis on Vince's perception. A few of the line additions scattered throughout the script felt out of rhythm and unintegrated. On a surprising note, Shepard gave Dodge a line apparently aimed at clarifying two of the richer ambiguities of the piece. When Vince claims to be Tilden's son, Dodge responds with the rhetorical question, "You mean he had two?"-thereby making the idea of an incestuous son specific rather than universal and erasing the notion of Vince's...