Shepard play starts BAAC season

The Bloomington Area Arts Council kicks off its 2001-2002 Performance Series next week. Detour Productions, a Bloomington-based theater production company, will begin the new theater season with "Buried Child," a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Sam Shepard. With the return of theater to the John Waldron Arts Center, 122 S. Walnut St., comes the return of something that has been missed, director Joe Gaines said.\n"It's been a while since Shepard has been done in Bloomington," Gaines said. \nGaines said he chose this play because he is a fan of Shepard's work. "Buried Child," in particular, is one of his favorite plays. \nOne of the reasons Detour Productions chose to put on this play is because it is different from their last show, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," producer Terence Hartnett said. \n"We had done this kind of a big comedy. This is a dark comedy, in a way," Gaines said. \nThe fact that it has been a long time since Shepard has been staged in Bloomington played a role in Gaines' directorial decisions. "For somebody who's seeing Shepard for the first time, I want to be true to what Shepard wrote." \n"Buried Child" is a play about a dysfunctional American family. Set in an old farmhouse in Southern Illinois, it focuses on a grandson's return home after being gone for years.\n"No one recognizes him," Gaines said. "(These people) are so dysfunctional they can't even recognize their own." \nThe family centers around an elderly couple, Dodge and Halie. They have two sons, Tilden and Bradley. A third son, Ansel, has died before the start of the play. In addition, Halie had a fourth baby once her children were older, but Dodge was not the father. The details about this other child are unknown, as it is a secret that the family tries to keep concealed. \nIt is this aspect that Steve Heise, who plays the role of Tilden, finds interesting. "If it's not rewarding to focus on the external world, we withdraw from that because it's so painful," Heise said. Tilden, in particular, displays the dysfunction of the family through his personality. He is introverted and withdrawn. His character speaks more about the mood of the family through what he does not say rather than through what he does say. He said that playing his character is different for him, because "in a certain way, there's not much there." Heise said the focus for his character is to give the audience the feeling of what is wrong, rather than telling them directly. \nTilden's son Vincent returns home to visit his grandparents after being gone for six or seven years. Hartnett explained that this disrupts the order of the family. The family has functioned for so long by accepting their dysfunctionality. that when Vincent returns, no one can deal with it. Vincent and his girlfriend, Shelly, ask questions to try and understand his family's past.\nWhat happens, Heise said, is that everyone is lying or rewriting the past. If one tries to discern the truth, they end up being confused. "It's disconcerting trying to figure out out what's going on," said Heise. \nIn the end, the truth about the missing child comes out. But what is never explained is the reason for the dysfunction. Gaines said that one ends up wondering not, "Why is this family dysfunctional?" but rather, "Why is it a family at all?"\nGaines said that the serious aspect of the play is the biggest challenge to putting it on. "I saw a description of the play as 'Macabre Americana,'" Gaines said. The toughest part of the production, he explained, will be to bring out the humor. "Shepard's a very funny writer," Gaines said, "and there are some very funny aspects of the play"