Capsule Reviews

Buried Child Kitchen Dog Theater stages Sam Shepard’s gothic Pulitzer Prize winner with an exquisite eye for detail and a perfectly pitched cast of actors who understand every word of this difficult drama. Or is it really a comedy? Shepard certainly gives us plenty to laugh at early on, as the ratty farmhouse fills up with a family of half-crazed misfits. Dodge (Barry Nash) is too sick to leave the couch. Halie (Marjorie Hayes) flirts with the preacher. Son Bradley (Scott Milligan) likes to play with chain saws, which explains his missing leg. Other son Tilden (Bryan Keith Moore) gathers items from the garden that he says are carrots and corn but which look like old dirty bottles and bits of paper. When grandson Vince (Seth Thomas Magill) drops in after a six-year absence, he’s sucked right into the morass of madness and dark secrets. Directed by Dan Day, the production looks, sounds and feels like a masterpiece. Just wait for that heartstopping moment at the end of Act 3. When the lights went down for the last time on opening night, nobody breathed. Through April 30 at Kitchen Dog Theater, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave., 214-953-1055. Reviewed this week. (Elaine Liner)

Medicine, Man Oh, man, you’ll need caffeine or something stronger to stay awake through Jeffrey Stanley’s overwritten, underplotted two-acter about a Southern hillbilly (Scott Latham) hee-hawing around the hospital waiting room while his mother (inert prop upstage) lies in a coma. A comely physician (Kerry Cole) tries to convince said hillbilly to let her put Mama on dialysis so she can conduct some new research. But hillbilly’s sister (Diane Worman) insists their mother has a living will that stipulates “do not rescuscitate.” Written long before the current media swarm over this topic, the play asks some interesting questions about families and death, mothers and sons and whether an American Indian shape-shifter (R Bruce Elliott) can send messages through a basket of fruit. But by the time intermission rolls around, the characters’ pulses are weakening and the audience is in need of a strong tonic. Pull the plug. Through April 23 at Theatre Three, 2800 Routh St., Suite 168, 214-871-3300. Reviewed this week. (E.L.)