In a previous issue of the Review, I discussed in some detail the parallels and, more to the point, contrasts between Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, arguing that the former emerges from a modernist worldview and the latter from a postmodern one (Vol. 17, No. 1 & 2 [Spring/Fall 1993]: 106-19). In this article I would like to explore the potential benefits of teaching these two plays together, suggesting a variety of pedagogical contexts in which they might be paired. At the outset, however, it might be useful to review briefly the elements which invite a comparison of two plays which at first glance may seem fundamentally at odds.

Both O’Neill and Shepard, proclaimed the leading dramatists of their times, are prolific, highly experimental playwrights with many successes (and some notable failures) to their credit. Both moved from avant-garde experimentation in subject and form early in their careers toward more realistic, traditionally­shaped dramas, drawing ever more directly on biographical sources and writing what can be regarded—on one level, at least—as domestic drama: Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Buried Child, each of which won a Pulitzer Prize.¹

The plays, which deal with the intimate relationships among members of a family, are tightly constructed, taking up the family history at a critical juncture and covering roughly similar time periods: from morning to midnight in Journey; from day to night to morning in Buried Child. The family configurations are nearly identical as well, with a father, mother and two adult sons in each case, along with a dead brother—the infant Eugene in the former and Ansel in the latter. Shepard’s play also includes a dead baby, probably (though not definitively) from an incestuous union of the mother Halie and the oldest son Tilden.

Like the dramatis personae, the plots also exhibit marked parallels. In both, the death of an infant many years ago—the infant Eugene in Journey, the unnamed baby in Child—marks the point at which each family, troubled before, began to disintegrate. The guilt both families experience in relation to this pivotal event surfaces gradually, revealing the secret buried in the bosom of each family: Mary Tyrone’s addiction, which can be traced back to the death of baby Eugene; the father Dodge’s infanticide. Both plays have absent mothers, literally in Child, figuratively in Journey. Both present sons who rebel against their fathers and fight among themselves. Finally, both plays feature families that seem isolated from the outside world, whether on an Illinois farm or at the end of the New London streetcar line.

There are also similarities in imagery and dramatic structure. Both plays, for instance, draw frequently upon water imagery—the ever-deepening fog in Long Day’s Journey, along with Edmund’s talk of the sea and many metaphorical references to drowning; the many references to rain in Buried Child. Both feature cyclic structures, with final scenes that become ironic reflections of their opening episodes, a structure which underlines the changes that have ensued during the day that has passed. Given these similarities, it is not surprising to learn of Shepard’s admiration for Long Day’s Journey, a play he read in high school and once referred to in an interview as “the truly great American play” (Cott 156).

As striking as these parallels are, however, they ultimately serve to focus the fundamental differences of these two plays, which is why teaching them in tandem can be effective on several levels. As indicated earlier, Journey emerges from a modernist weltanschauung, while Buried Child is decidedly postmodern in its vision. Since these terms have been variously defined, it might help to note briefly the feature of each most relevant to this topic: the way in which each regards the past. For the modernist—Woolf, Pound, Eliot, or Faulkner, for example—the past, though it has failed to provide answers and in no way is to be uncritically imitated, is taken seriously. For good or ill, the world of the present is seen as emerging from that matrix. Thus we encounter, along with an aesthetic rejection of old forms and structures, an acknowledgment of the inescapable imprint of history and a respect for the accomplishments of previous generations—the position articulated in Eliot’s classic 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The postmodernist, on the other hand, sees history as totally non-continuous; no connecting themes or meta-narratives (Marx, Darwin, Freud, religion) can give shape to the random events that constitute the passing of time. Causal relationships are also suspect; the assumption that an event which occurred in the past can explain what is happening in the present or predict what will happen in the future seems hopelessly naive to the postmodern thinker.

With this description in mind, consider the attitudes the families in these plays take toward their pasts. The Tyrones, though devastated by the tragic events of their past, regard it as definitive. Individually as well as collectively, the Tyrones locate their ideals in the past and experience them as forever beyond their reach. Indeed, it is this very fact which binds them together and leads to their cycles of accusation and recrimination. Mary’s famous statement, “The past is the present,” epitomizes this attitude. In Shepard’s play, not only is the past detached from the present moment in ways most would consider meaningful; it’s also indeterminate. Though saturated with dates and facts, the details of this family’s past don’t add up, even in the most essential areas, like who fathered the dead child and what happened to it, whether or not they recognize Vince when he returns after six years—or even something as simple as whether there are real crops growing outside. The notion of a definitive past is problematized at every turn. Further, while the pain of the past unites the Tyrones, it separates the members of this family—which, interestingly, has no last name. They seem as indifferent to one another as they are to their own past lives.

The playwrights’ use of literary and mythic allusions provides another striking contrast. O’Neill’s use of allusions is designed to enhance and deepen our understanding of the characters, themes, and events of the play. Whether James’s Shakespearean quotations; Jamie’s references to both Shakespeare (always ironic) and more contemporary writers like Rossetti, Swinburne and Wilde; or Edmund’s drawing upon the Decadents and Nietzsche—each set of allusions reflects the worldview and mindset of its speaker. Shepard, on the other hand, invokes myth ironically, using it to debunk itself. His elaborate invocation of the Fisher King legend, for instance, ultimately raises more questions than it answers. Critics, seeking explanations for the factual inconsistencies of Buried Child, have looked to this allusion, seeing Dodge, the father, as the old king whose psychic wound has caused the infertility of the land, and Vince as the new king whose return restores fertility and accounts for the otherwise inexplicable corn crop that suddenly appears though Dodge says he hasn’t planted corn for thirty years—an interpretation which the play’s abundant references invite. But although both castration and fertility symbols abound, this allusion ultimately doesn’t add up. If Dodge is the old king who must give way to the new order, why are castration images associated with both him (the savage haircut his son Bradley gives him) and Bradley, whose wooden leg is stolen not once but twice, by Shelly and Vince in turn? If Vince is the new king, why do the carrots and corn appear before his return? And why is it Tilden, not Vince, whose unearthing of the buried child at play’s end is associated with the mysterious growth of the crops? I would argue that Shepard, with his postmodern sensibility, invokes myth only to debunk it, creating an over­determined plot with dates and details that ultimately lead nowhere.

Precisely because the worldviews that inform these two plays represent such contrasting positions, teaching them together can effectively illustrate the fundamental differences between modernism and postmodernism. This works particularly well in classes designed to theorize those distinctions. One example of this is an American drama class I teach which is organized around pairs of plays, one modern, one contemporary, that deal with similar issues, a strategy which encourages consideration of the continuities and discontinuities between these historical eras. Death of a Salesman (1949) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), to illustrate one such pair, speak to problems associated with capitalism, competition, the pursuit of the American dream, and the ethos of the business world, but from strikingly different perspectives. While Willy Loman, though a tragic figure, remains anchored in and defined by family, both his family of origin and his wife and sons, Shelly Levene and his counterparts in Mamet’s postmodern drama are completely unmoored socially; though camaraderie seems to prevail among the salesmen, in fact each is an island unto himself and families seem nonexistent.² Willy also lives in a world where language is still trusted as a means of communication, while in the world of the later play, language has become unstable, stripped of content. The proliferation of obscenities, for instance, which are used with numbing frequency as nouns, verbs, adjectives, participles, and exclamations, ultimately renders them meaningless. The characters, whose lexicon is virtually identical, are linguistically determined, limited by their vocabularies in what they can articulate and hence, understand and control. One might argue, in fact, that unlike Salesman, Glengarry is ultimately more concerned about the relationship between identity and language than the American dream gone awry. In this context, teaching Long Day’s Journey and Buried Child together works particularly well to highlight the differences between a world in which despair can be measured against ideals which, though unattainable, can still be articulated, as opposed to one in which the very concept of ideals has been cast aside.

I have also taught a graduate seminar entitled “Modern and Postmodern Drama,” devoted to a study of the canons of O’Neill and Shepard, respectively. This approach allows students to see the development of particular themes and techniques in each playwright across a spectrum of multiple plays and several decades, while experiencing the contrast between two vastly different artists, both acknowledged as masters in their times. The climax of this class was a contrast between Long Day’s Journey and Buried Child from the vantage point of a full semester’s experience with both playwrights and a rich understanding of the philosophical differences between modern and postmodern worldviews.