Calling Buried Child "Shepard's best play," Simon reviews the 1996 revival. The critic offers a highly favorable appraisal of the work, calling it "as good of its kind as it gets."

Buried Child is Sam Shepard's best play. It is what the French call miserabiliste theater, but as good of its kind as they come, as much of a classic as Christina's World or a George Price cartoon. The central concept of a rural American family going down the drain because of - literally - a skeleton in the closet may be a bit schematic and the symbol-ism-cum-absurdism a tad dragged in by the cat. Even so, the flamboyant blend of the comic and the horrific, the verbally teasing and visually terrifying - in short, the hair-and-hackle-raising humor - takes you to a Shepard country where, laughing and shuddering, you never know when you'll be rolling in the...