Don’t get your tickets mixed up at the Pershing Square Signature Center! One of the multiplex’s venues offers a revival of “Buried Child,” Sam Shepard’s gothic drama about a dilapidated family. Another hosts “Old Hats,” a clown revue starring Bill Irwin and David Shiner.
These two wildly different productions share one thing beyond their venue: They’re both very good.
The main reason to see “Buried Child” (through April 3) is Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, who are a longtime, happily married couple playing a longtime, desperately miserable couple. Harris spends most of the show on a threadbare couch and somehow manages to be charismatic anyway. For decades he embodied a certain American masculinity on screen; here, he embodies its wreckage, wrapped in a carefully calibrated mix of despair and black humor.
Madigan has a tricky role, delivering a good chunk of her lines unseen, from offstage; when she turns up at the end, she looks like the ghost of horrors past.
Some of the supporting roles are a little wonkier. As the newcomer in that most tragic of American families, Taissa Farmiga (TV’s “American Horror Story”) gives a mannered performance — at times she sounds like Barbara Stanwyck in “Ball of Fire” — but it reinforces her stranger-in-a-strange-land status and she makes it work for her.
Another TV refugee, Rich Sommer (“Mad Men”), is largely ineffectual as the son who cut off his own leg and now wears a prosthetic (more gallows humor ensues).
Just across the lobby, Irwin and Shiner are reprising their 2013 hit “Old Hats” (through April 3). The main difference is that Shaina Taub and her band have replaced Nellie McKay as the live accompanists. Taub’s ol’ timey original songs are less biting than McKay’s, but she’s an amusing companion to the clowning star.
The show is a series of largely silent, self-contained vaudevillian vignettes that allow Shiner and Irwin to display their uncanny precision and physical grace. It’s hard to pick a favorite but the extended magic act — with Irwin in drag as the assistant to Shiner’s ponytailed, hapless illusionist — is as funny as ever.
Be warned that “Old Hats” features extensive audience participation. Unlike, thankfully, “Buried Child.”