Buried Child

The Nora Theatre Company presents Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winner Buried Child.
The play chronicles the corrosive effects of a family’s long-held secret.

In 1979 Buried Child won the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a play premiering off-Broadway, propelling Shepard into the national spotlight. Exploring a dark side of the American Dream, the play chronicles three generations of a Midwestern family struggling against each other, some denying and repressing a past others are desperate to reveal, all haunted by the sudden fertility of their long-barren fields. From its darkly humorous opening to an implosive final act, the play examines the corrosive effects of a long-held secret in a family ravaged by guilt and shame.

The Nora will use the playwright’s 1995 revised script, which was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and was declared by New York Magazine to be “wildly poetic, full of stage images and utterances replete with insidious suggestiveness.” The play has stood the test of time, remaining as compelling today as it was three decades ago.