Prompt 8: Buried Child

                Buried Child is seemingly realistic, showing a piece of everyday life for a pretty regular, albeit incredibly crazy, dysfunctional, farming family. On the outside, you’d expect it to be fairly true to life since it deals with everyday events, and horrible, but still possible, secrets. The problem with this play, however, is that through closer inspection, there are things that just don’t make since in the lifelike setting. There’s mysterious corn, for example, that none of the characters have planted. At first we think they are crops that Tilden stole from the neighbors, but at the end we hear Halie exclaim that there are all sorts of crops growing outside. This is left completely unexplained, and ambiguous. Another thing that does not seem to fit into the realism of the play is Vince’s speech about running away. He says that he was driving, but then he saw the reflections of his family members, even people he hasn’t ever seen before. Now, until this point, Vince has been a fairly normal guy, but this incident changes him drastically. He becomes like a new Dodge. Finally, there is the fact that upon Vince’s first arrival with Shelly, no one recognizes him except Halie. It leaves many questions. Why does his own father not recognize him and why is Halie the only one that does? These strange occurrences that don’t exactly fit into the illusion of realism blur the lines between the family’s insanity, and the physical world of the play. The audience is left uncertain of what was and wasn’t “real”.