Buried Child
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Which makes director Hans Fleischmann’s staging of Buried Child for Mary-Arrchie Theatre Company all the more remarkable. A month ago the 30-year-old Fleischmann, Mary-Arrchie’s producing director for the last four years, was cast as Vince, a 22-year-old struggling musician who returns to his grandparents’ Illinois farm only to find that no one in his family has the faintest idea who he is. But when younger actor Carlo Lorenzo Garcia showed up and tried out for the part, the producer in Fleischmann knew he had to surrender the role. At that point no one had yet been hired to direct, and when Mary-Arrchie artistic director Richard Cotovsky began suggesting people, Fleischmann nixed all of them. “Well, if you won’t take any of them,” Cotovsky said, “then you direct it.” Fleischmann had never directed in his life and had little opportunity to prepare, but he took the challenge and has delivered one of the year’s best productions.
Buried Child is a masterpiece whose layers of warped “reality” are difficult to convey. During Vince’s six-year absence something has gone terribly wrong with the family, something involving a short-lived baby born to his grandmother Halie. Since then Vince’s grandparents and their two sons have fallen into a kind of group psychosis, inventing alternate family histories to obscure what happened. Halie, who rails against sinners but is having an affair with the town’s preacher, spends her days locked upstairs idealizing a son, Ansel, who died as a young adult. Dodge, her husband, is a belligerent, alcoholic invalid who spends all his time downstairs on the sofa insisting that nothing from the past exists, including the family photos covering Halie’s room. Their son Bradley, always belittled as a child, now fancies himself the family bully, though he cowers like a five-year-old whenever his mother raises her voice. Their other son is Tilden, Vince’s father, who’s been so traumatized by the family tragedy that he stumbles through life like a thick-skulled amnesiac child. They’ve all tacitly agreed that nothing untoward has occurred, and if it has they must never speak of it.
