With the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, theatre depoliticized into illuminating the dreams and nightmares of American life, represented by Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-winning play, Buried Child (1979). Though the postwar family stayed mostly intact, with the patriarch Dodge, matriarch Halie, and two of their sons, Tilden and Bradley remaining, it was at the edge of dysfunction. When Dodge's grandson, Vince, returned from New York to his rural family farm with girlfriend Shelly, he desperately found that his family could no longer recognize him. Underlying this overt tension is an unspeakable filthy secret: Dodge once buried the child conceived by his incestuous wife, Halie, and his eldest son, Tilden in the backyard. Therefore, in this essay, I will analyze how Shepard portrayed characters’ disintegration of identity in response to urbanization, dysfunctional familial relationship and the unattainable American dream.

Primarily, identity is explored as something that social context can alter. Torn by civic riots and racial struggles, urbanity once lost its popularity in the mid 20th century. But when American economy became organized along industrial, capitalist lines, “America Falls in Love with Its Cities — Again,” observed the Saturday Review in 1978. Though Shepard did not show us Vince’s prior disposition, it can be implied by his family’s oblivion that urbanization posed significant threats to Vince’s personality, after his bonding with New York City for six years. Unable to evoke his families’ memories about him, he noted "I studied my face... as though I was looking at another man. Like a mummy's face.” (Shepard, 111) Family, a synonym for beacons in the dark, ironically detached him from himself, wherein Shepard used “mummy” as a manifestation of his internal void. He finally came back drunken and did not escape the fate of streams of not recognizing who his families were, carrying on a sense of continuity between generations. The dysfunctional familial relationship and the disparity between environments he lived contributed to Vince’s easily-diffused sense of self. Shelly, whom Dodge referred to as a "hoper" and a life-affirming person, once lost her rationality. After she revealed the dark secret, she emasculated Bradley by taking away his prosthetic leg, a breakdown of her intact innocence when entering the house, dreaming the dinner to be “a Norman Rockwell cover.” (Shepard, 39) The immorality she witnessed temporarily penetrated into her character.

Unlike the inevitable forces that formed Vince’s and Shelly’s disorientation, other characters’ disillusionment derived from their intentional invention of identities, proving it to be something which cannot be pretended: Tilden, a formal all-American football player, returned as a worn-out man who could no longer function in society. Bradley, with one leg amputated, intimidated people and talked wildly to cover his inferiority. When they failed to maintain the glory of their disguised identities, both resorted into incapacitation: Tilden emotionally and Bradley physically. Similar to the sons’ failings to meet parental ideals of having them inherit family heir, American youngsters in the 1970s are fully aware of the nation’s obsessions with material prosperity, but few managed to transcend social classes or ethnic race. In a broader context, the unattainable American dream in the 1970s could be seen as a gigantic ‘Frankenstein’ that dehumanized people into monsters lack of intact minds.

In Buried Child, Dodge's death and Vince’s inheritance of the family affairs still left possibilities for salvation. After the revelation of the family’s filthy past, the remaining members reached some degree of redeemed unity where they bulldozed the deep-rooted guilt and put forth some self- recognition. The open ending gives important revelations about the identity crisis in the 21st century with information deluges, Artificial Intelligence, and declining moral rigidity: to stop escaping and try to reconcile with our past shall bring about wholesome self-recognition. In depicting the miniature of a depilated American family, Shepard explored identity disintegration as a result of societal context, familial breakdown and individual dishonesty, portraying it as something changeable but coherent, echoing his quest for authenticity and humanity.