Born-dying: The Dramatic Function of the Child in Sam Shepard's The Buried Child.

Abstract

Because every action is in fact a reaction to something else, drama is obviously best understood in the light of effects and their causes. Worldwide concern as innovation, globalization, shifting values, emerging poverty, and changing gender roles disturb traditional families and challenge the very idea of marriage all through the world. Unsurprisingly, the emerging marriage and family, in effect, become the central issue in modern drama. Sam Shepard clearly explained the notion of family: “What doesn't have to do with family? There isn't anything. Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other – everyone is born out of a mother and a father and you go on to be a father. It's an endless cycle” (Adler, 2002: 111)
At various points, however, marriage in modern drama is apt to represent a standing tension between these two dramatic forces- mother and father. In other words, just as in traditional moral theology the purpose of marriage is defined as principally the proliferation and education of children, in drama, the dramatic function of childhood is the direct personification of the conflict of forces which is the marriage of mother and father. Outstandingly, in some cases children function as "necessary evils". They are there because the playwright just cannot do without them. In other cases, their actual presence throughout the play is terminated. In all cases, the child's significance is large enough to occupy the position of source of the drama's title as it is the case in Edward Albee's The play about the baby (1998) and Sam Shepard's The Buried Child (1979).
This then is the topic: the dramatic function of children in modern drama, along with the frequent necessity of making a point by eliminating a particular child and all it stands for. The child in The Buried Child will be a direct representation of the case.
The conclusion sums up the major findings of the research