Buried Child is a play by Sam Shepard first presented in 1978. It won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and launched Shepard to national fame as a playwright. Buried Child is a piece of theater which depicts the fragmentation of the American nuclear family in a context of disappointment and disillusionment with American mythology and the American dream, the 1970s rural economic slowdown and the breakdown of traditional family structures and values.
Read more about Buried Child: Characters, Shepard's Intention, Style, Mixing of Genres, Character Summaries, Performance History
Famous quotes containing the words buried and/or child:
“it is best then that the buried word remain buried for we were intended to appreciate only its fruits and not the secret principle activating them to know this would be to know too much. Meanwhile it is possible to know just enough, and this is all we were supposed to know, toward which we have been straining all our lives.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)