Buried Child by Sam Shephard at the English Theatre Berlin
ENGLISH THEATRE BERLIN
formerly known as Friends of Italian Opera www.etberlin.de
Pressematerial zum Download: www.berlin-buehnen.de/-/presse/47.598
F40, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965 Berlin-Kreuzberg, Reservierung: 030/691 12 11 tickets@etberlin.de
TICKETS: 18,- / erm. 10,- / 3-Euro-Ticket / Gruppenrabatt
Do 15. (Premiere) bis So 18. April um 20 Uhr
Di 20.- Sa 24. und Di 27. April bis So 2. Mai um 20 Uhr
Koproduktion: English Theatre Berlin & 7 Stages/Atlanta/USA
Buried Child
Pulitzerpreis 1979: Sam Shephards bissiges Familiendrama.
mit / cast
Dodge - Del Hamilton
Halie - Faye Allen
Tilden Jeffrey Mittleman
Bradley - Harvey Friedman
Vince - Tomas S. Spencer
Shelly - April Small
Father Dewis - Errol T. Harewood
Autor / written by Sam Shephard, rights with kind permission by S. Fischer Verlag
Regie / directed by Veronika Nowag-Jones
Bühne und Kostüme / set and costumes by Tomas Fitzpatrick
Musikalische Leitung / musical direction by Errol T. Harewood
Licht / lights by Katri Kuusimäki
Fotos / photos by David Baltzer
In seinem 1979 mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichneten Drama gewährt Sam Shepard nicht ohne Witz makabren Einblick in eine Familie, die ihren amerikanischen Traum durch ein Familiengeheimnis zerstört hat. Statt sich mit den Tatsachen zu konfrontieren wurde ein Inzest durch Mord vertuscht. Der Vater wurde zum grantelnden Säufer, die Mutter fand Trost in der Religion und dem attraktiven Priester, die erwachsenen Söhne sind beide völlig schräg drauf gekommen und wohnen plötzlich wieder bei den Eltern. Da taucht der scheinbar unbekannte Enkel Vince mit seiner Freundin auf, die durch ihre direkte Art die Familie so heftig aufmischt, dass die Vergangenheit ans Licht drängt. Es kommt zu einem herben aber Happy End.
Sam Shepard gilt als einer der wichtigsten lebenden US-amerikanischen Bühnenautoren. Mit seiner Mischung aus Witz, Action und trockenem Realismus seziert er die Rituale, das Vokabular und das moralische Korsett der amerikanischen Lower Class.
Buried Child first premièred on 27 June 1978 at the Magic Theatre, San Francisco, directed by Robert Woodruff. Sam Shepard reworked the play for a production at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago in 1996, directed by Gary Sinise. The English Theatre Berlin / 7 Stages production is based on the reworked version.
Plot Synopsis www.theatredatabase.com
In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, Buried Child, Sam Shepard takes a macabre look at one American Midwestern family with a very dark secret.
When Vince brings his girlfriend, Shelly, home to meet his family, she is at first charmed by the "normal" looking farm house which she compares to a "Norman Rockwell cover or something"--that's before she actually meets his crazy family - his ranting, alcoholic grandparents (Dodge and Halie) and their two sons: Tilden, a hulking semi-idiot, and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Strangely, no one seems to remember Vince at first, and they treat him as an intruder. Eventually, however, they seem to accept him as a part of their violently dysfunctional family.
Gradually, the family's dark secret begins to come clear. Years ago Dodge, the grandfather, buried an unwanted newborn (possibly the product of an incestual relationship between Tilden and his mother) in some undisclosed location in the backyard. From that point forward, the entire family lived under a cloud of guilt that is finally dispelled when Tilden unearths the unfortunate child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. This act seems to purge the family of its curse. Corn now grows in the fields where nothing would grow for years.
The play ends with a proclamation of hope from Halie who says:
"You can't force a thing to grow. You can't interfere with it. It's all hidden. It's all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong enough. Strong enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle."
Sam Shepard:
"We don´t know each other in America. It starts on the family level, and there are certain areas in the country like in the west and in the south where 'family' is very strong, and there are other areas where it doesn't even exist! People don't have any connection whatsoever to each other, to their siblings, or know who their father is or their mother, they're just wild.
I'm haunted by that character. The American character is more about that than anything else, more than success, more than power and strength and all the other things that we present ourselves to be. It's more about the strange, strange lack of identity. We don't really know who we are, we never have known who we are. We've invented it! We don't have a clue! We're like wandering vagabonds!"
"Where do you even begin with Sam Shepard? With his Pulitzer prize? His Oscar nomination? The fact that he's routinely described as 'America's greatest living playwright?' Or if you're going to be superficial about it ... maybe the place to start is with the image of him as the tall, taciturn test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the cowboy-ish character he played in The Right Stuff; a man whose life was spent exploring the outer edge of what is and isn't possible.
(...)
He's still, even after all these years, he says, an outsider. 'I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in… and at certain times in my life I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.' The writers who he responds most to are those who seem to share a sense of 'aloneness', and 'writing is almost a response to that aloneness which can't be answered in any other way'.
For Shepard, the heart of this, seemingly, and a recurring theme in his work, is bound up with the relationship he had with his alcoholic, abusive father. It's there in True West, Fool for Love, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind, and even now, at the age of 66, it troubles him still. In Fool for Love, written almost three decades ago, the main character is haunted by the chilling possibility that he is turning into his father. Back then it was a fear; now, he says, it has become a fact."
(Caroll Cadwalladr, The Observer, 21.10.10)
Sam Shepard, born November 5, 1943, raised on a farm in Illinois, moved to New York in 1963. He became involved in the Off-Off-Broadway theatre and rock music scene. Even he acted occasionally he was more interested in writing, mostly for the stage, but he also had early screen-writing credits for Me and My Brother and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. His early science-fiction play The Unseen Hand influenced Richard O'Brien's stage musical Rocky Horror Show. Since 1963 he has written nearly fifty plays including Curse of the Starving Class (1978), True West (1980), Fool For Love (1983), and Kicking a Dead Horse (2007). He collaborated with Bob Dylan on the surrealist film Renaldo and Clara (1978) and wrote the scripts for two Wim Wenders movies, Paris, Texas (1984) and Don't Come Knocking (2005).
His acting career began in earnest when he was cast in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven in 1978. This led to other important films and roles, most notably The Right Stuff, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1983, Steel Magnolias, All the Pretty Horses, Black Hawk Down, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and many others. On Broadway he was last seen as the father in Caryl Churchill´s A Number. He has received numerous awards for his work both as an actor and a writer. After a long-standing affair with Patti Smith, he since 1983 lives with actress Jessica Lange. They have two kids.
Veronika Nowag-Jones has been working as an actor and director for numerous theatres in the US and Germany; in the 1970s she was a member of George Tabori's famous theatre ensemble in Bremen and has since directed for the Clarence Brown Theatre Tennessee, the Theater Center Philadelphia (PA), 7 Stages Atlanta (GA) and the Teatro Ateneo Caracas, Venezuela. Veronika appeared in more than 50 movies and was last seen in Bis nichts mehr bleibt, a controversial TV movie about the Scientology sect; she is an acting teacher for film and TV at the ISFF Berlin;
Del Hamilton, co-founder and Artistic Director of 7 Stages Theater has directed over 60 productions and has also acted in numerous ones. He directed a very successful production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Teatr Nowy in Poznan/Poland, and he has acted and directed at theatres in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Belgrade, Johannesburg and Amsterdam. Del is the author of several plays and has received numerous awards.
Faye Allen, co-founder of 7 Stages Theater has acted in numerous 7 Stages productions. As producing director, she serves as the primary coordinator for all production aspects of 7 Stages' plays, including selecting designers, casting productions, coordinating rehearsals, and managing all other production elements. 7 Stages has produced two of Faye's own plays, Hunger Pains and Reclaiming Your Garbage.
Jeffrey Mittleman, originally a native from New York, he has studied with the likes of Uta Hagen, Susan Grace Cohen before setting here in Berlin in 1994. Since 1995 he has performed in numerous film-, tv-, theatre productions while living in Europe. He currently works extensively as a voice-over artist for a myriad of projects. He is happy to be alive performing Sam Shepard for the stage in Berlin.
Harvey Friedman, born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon University. He toured several continents with the polish theatre ensemble "Teatr Kreatr", the first non-state theatre ever invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. Harvey completed the Berlin Marathon in 2:51:13 in 1993. He plays Dr. Joseph Goebbels in Valkyrie.
Tomas S. Spencer lives and works in Berlin since 2002. He's been in several productions at English Theatre Berlin, i. e. The Age of Consent, The Caretaker, Fallen Angels. His movie credits include Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey), Vollidiot (Tobias Baumann) and most recently The Last Station/Ein Russischer Sommer (Michael Hoffman) where he played Tolstoy's son Andrej opposite Helen Mirren.
April Small began her training at Ballet School and completed her first Degree in Professional Dance at Bird College in 2005. During this period also studying part time at the Acting school Rose Bruford/London. Furthermore one year Advanced Classical Acting at The City Lit/London. Recent credits include The Seagull, Pinter’ s Progress, John Boy, Pause To Wonder, Assassins.
Errol Trotman-Harewood was born in Guyana and moved to the UK in 1967. He began studying drums at the age of 9, has been performing since age 10 and started teaching percussion after doing service in the British Army. He has been acting in numerous plays and musicals in Germany and can be seen in movies such as Straight Shooter, Lippels Traum, and most recently Polanski's The Ghostwriter.
formerly known as Friends of Italian Opera www.etberlin.de
Pressematerial zum Download: www.berlin-buehnen.de/-/presse/47.598
F40, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965 Berlin-Kreuzberg, Reservierung: 030/691 12 11 tickets@etberlin.de
TICKETS: 18,- / erm. 10,- / 3-Euro-Ticket / Gruppenrabatt
Do 15. (Premiere) bis So 18. April um 20 Uhr
Di 20.- Sa 24. und Di 27. April bis So 2. Mai um 20 Uhr
Koproduktion: English Theatre Berlin & 7 Stages/Atlanta/USA
Buried Child
Pulitzerpreis 1979: Sam Shephards bissiges Familiendrama.
mit / cast
Dodge - Del Hamilton
Halie - Faye Allen
Tilden Jeffrey Mittleman
Bradley - Harvey Friedman
Vince - Tomas S. Spencer
Shelly - April Small
Father Dewis - Errol T. Harewood
Autor / written by Sam Shephard, rights with kind permission by S. Fischer Verlag
Regie / directed by Veronika Nowag-Jones
Bühne und Kostüme / set and costumes by Tomas Fitzpatrick
Musikalische Leitung / musical direction by Errol T. Harewood
Licht / lights by Katri Kuusimäki
Fotos / photos by David Baltzer
In seinem 1979 mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichneten Drama gewährt Sam Shepard nicht ohne Witz makabren Einblick in eine Familie, die ihren amerikanischen Traum durch ein Familiengeheimnis zerstört hat. Statt sich mit den Tatsachen zu konfrontieren wurde ein Inzest durch Mord vertuscht. Der Vater wurde zum grantelnden Säufer, die Mutter fand Trost in der Religion und dem attraktiven Priester, die erwachsenen Söhne sind beide völlig schräg drauf gekommen und wohnen plötzlich wieder bei den Eltern. Da taucht der scheinbar unbekannte Enkel Vince mit seiner Freundin auf, die durch ihre direkte Art die Familie so heftig aufmischt, dass die Vergangenheit ans Licht drängt. Es kommt zu einem herben aber Happy End.
Sam Shepard gilt als einer der wichtigsten lebenden US-amerikanischen Bühnenautoren. Mit seiner Mischung aus Witz, Action und trockenem Realismus seziert er die Rituale, das Vokabular und das moralische Korsett der amerikanischen Lower Class.
Buried Child first premièred on 27 June 1978 at the Magic Theatre, San Francisco, directed by Robert Woodruff. Sam Shepard reworked the play for a production at Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago in 1996, directed by Gary Sinise. The English Theatre Berlin / 7 Stages production is based on the reworked version.
Plot Synopsis www.theatredatabase.com
In his 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, Buried Child, Sam Shepard takes a macabre look at one American Midwestern family with a very dark secret.
When Vince brings his girlfriend, Shelly, home to meet his family, she is at first charmed by the "normal" looking farm house which she compares to a "Norman Rockwell cover or something"--that's before she actually meets his crazy family - his ranting, alcoholic grandparents (Dodge and Halie) and their two sons: Tilden, a hulking semi-idiot, and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Strangely, no one seems to remember Vince at first, and they treat him as an intruder. Eventually, however, they seem to accept him as a part of their violently dysfunctional family.
Gradually, the family's dark secret begins to come clear. Years ago Dodge, the grandfather, buried an unwanted newborn (possibly the product of an incestual relationship between Tilden and his mother) in some undisclosed location in the backyard. From that point forward, the entire family lived under a cloud of guilt that is finally dispelled when Tilden unearths the unfortunate child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. This act seems to purge the family of its curse. Corn now grows in the fields where nothing would grow for years.
The play ends with a proclamation of hope from Halie who says:
"You can't force a thing to grow. You can't interfere with it. It's all hidden. It's all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong enough. Strong enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle."
Sam Shepard:
"We don´t know each other in America. It starts on the family level, and there are certain areas in the country like in the west and in the south where 'family' is very strong, and there are other areas where it doesn't even exist! People don't have any connection whatsoever to each other, to their siblings, or know who their father is or their mother, they're just wild.
I'm haunted by that character. The American character is more about that than anything else, more than success, more than power and strength and all the other things that we present ourselves to be. It's more about the strange, strange lack of identity. We don't really know who we are, we never have known who we are. We've invented it! We don't have a clue! We're like wandering vagabonds!"
"Where do you even begin with Sam Shepard? With his Pulitzer prize? His Oscar nomination? The fact that he's routinely described as 'America's greatest living playwright?' Or if you're going to be superficial about it ... maybe the place to start is with the image of him as the tall, taciturn test pilot, Chuck Yeager, the cowboy-ish character he played in The Right Stuff; a man whose life was spent exploring the outer edge of what is and isn't possible.
(...)
He's still, even after all these years, he says, an outsider. 'I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in… and at certain times in my life I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.' The writers who he responds most to are those who seem to share a sense of 'aloneness', and 'writing is almost a response to that aloneness which can't be answered in any other way'.
For Shepard, the heart of this, seemingly, and a recurring theme in his work, is bound up with the relationship he had with his alcoholic, abusive father. It's there in True West, Fool for Love, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind, and even now, at the age of 66, it troubles him still. In Fool for Love, written almost three decades ago, the main character is haunted by the chilling possibility that he is turning into his father. Back then it was a fear; now, he says, it has become a fact."
(Caroll Cadwalladr, The Observer, 21.10.10)
Sam Shepard, born November 5, 1943, raised on a farm in Illinois, moved to New York in 1963. He became involved in the Off-Off-Broadway theatre and rock music scene. Even he acted occasionally he was more interested in writing, mostly for the stage, but he also had early screen-writing credits for Me and My Brother and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. His early science-fiction play The Unseen Hand influenced Richard O'Brien's stage musical Rocky Horror Show. Since 1963 he has written nearly fifty plays including Curse of the Starving Class (1978), True West (1980), Fool For Love (1983), and Kicking a Dead Horse (2007). He collaborated with Bob Dylan on the surrealist film Renaldo and Clara (1978) and wrote the scripts for two Wim Wenders movies, Paris, Texas (1984) and Don't Come Knocking (2005).
His acting career began in earnest when he was cast in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven in 1978. This led to other important films and roles, most notably The Right Stuff, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1983, Steel Magnolias, All the Pretty Horses, Black Hawk Down, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and many others. On Broadway he was last seen as the father in Caryl Churchill´s A Number. He has received numerous awards for his work both as an actor and a writer. After a long-standing affair with Patti Smith, he since 1983 lives with actress Jessica Lange. They have two kids.
Veronika Nowag-Jones has been working as an actor and director for numerous theatres in the US and Germany; in the 1970s she was a member of George Tabori's famous theatre ensemble in Bremen and has since directed for the Clarence Brown Theatre Tennessee, the Theater Center Philadelphia (PA), 7 Stages Atlanta (GA) and the Teatro Ateneo Caracas, Venezuela. Veronika appeared in more than 50 movies and was last seen in Bis nichts mehr bleibt, a controversial TV movie about the Scientology sect; she is an acting teacher for film and TV at the ISFF Berlin;
Del Hamilton, co-founder and Artistic Director of 7 Stages Theater has directed over 60 productions and has also acted in numerous ones. He directed a very successful production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Teatr Nowy in Poznan/Poland, and he has acted and directed at theatres in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Belgrade, Johannesburg and Amsterdam. Del is the author of several plays and has received numerous awards.
Faye Allen, co-founder of 7 Stages Theater has acted in numerous 7 Stages productions. As producing director, she serves as the primary coordinator for all production aspects of 7 Stages' plays, including selecting designers, casting productions, coordinating rehearsals, and managing all other production elements. 7 Stages has produced two of Faye's own plays, Hunger Pains and Reclaiming Your Garbage.
Jeffrey Mittleman, originally a native from New York, he has studied with the likes of Uta Hagen, Susan Grace Cohen before setting here in Berlin in 1994. Since 1995 he has performed in numerous film-, tv-, theatre productions while living in Europe. He currently works extensively as a voice-over artist for a myriad of projects. He is happy to be alive performing Sam Shepard for the stage in Berlin.
Harvey Friedman, born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon University. He toured several continents with the polish theatre ensemble "Teatr Kreatr", the first non-state theatre ever invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. Harvey completed the Berlin Marathon in 2:51:13 in 1993. He plays Dr. Joseph Goebbels in Valkyrie.
Tomas S. Spencer lives and works in Berlin since 2002. He's been in several productions at English Theatre Berlin, i. e. The Age of Consent, The Caretaker, Fallen Angels. His movie credits include Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey), Vollidiot (Tobias Baumann) and most recently The Last Station/Ein Russischer Sommer (Michael Hoffman) where he played Tolstoy's son Andrej opposite Helen Mirren.
April Small began her training at Ballet School and completed her first Degree in Professional Dance at Bird College in 2005. During this period also studying part time at the Acting school Rose Bruford/London. Furthermore one year Advanced Classical Acting at The City Lit/London. Recent credits include The Seagull, Pinter’ s Progress, John Boy, Pause To Wonder, Assassins.
Errol Trotman-Harewood was born in Guyana and moved to the UK in 1967. He began studying drums at the age of 9, has been performing since age 10 and started teaching percussion after doing service in the British Army. He has been acting in numerous plays and musicals in Germany and can be seen in movies such as Straight Shooter, Lippels Traum, and most recently Polanski's The Ghostwriter.
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