Incest, murder and electric guitars

Tonight, I saw Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Buried Child at the National Theatre, with M. Emmet Walsh and Lauren Ambrose, among others, and accompanied by a live electric guitar score. Shepard excels at depicting characters caught between two worlds - a mythical past and a modernised present. When Vince returns to the home he has not visited in six years, no one seems to remember him - neither his bickering grandparents, nor his mentally-vacant father - much to the crazed bemusement of his girlfriend whom he'd fed with stories of an apple-pie dream of a childhood house. A fantastic cast, portraying with relish the fractious relationships between members of a normal, sorry, dysfunctional family in America's heartland, burdened by secrets of incest and murder.

Terrific performances, prefaced with an even greater one on the way to the theatre:

Companion: Do we have to see this play. Could we not go drink at the NFT instead?
Me (with the crazed glint of a fanatic in my eye): But Sam Shepard is a preeminent playwright of the American avant garde!
Companion: What?! That baffoon who couldn't even act his way out of the Pelican Brief and Baby Boom?!
Me: Er, yes...

Okay, so I exaggerate, but my friend was far less suspicious after the show.

Was I the only teenager who hung posters of Sam Shepard and not Simon Le Bon on her wall?

Related link:
+ Portrait of the artist: Sam Shepard and the anxiety of identity. Masters thesis (not mine!). For the devoted only.

Other links today:
+ The cult of Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time
+ Super Size Me sequel. Out in 2005.
+ The Magic Roundabout movie!