I saw the play Buried Child by Sam Shephard on Saturday. What a crazy, crazy play and so representative of the energy of Sam Shephard's early career, with the crazy dysfunctional family and images of food.

I wasn't sure if the Saturday audience at ACT liked it. There were two people, older, much older, from Monterey complaining about how they didn't understand the play. Did they even try? One of them, an older woman, she must have been around 80 years old with her frail bony body, lifeless white hair and papery thin blue veined skin, told the usher that she wished ACT would do more normal plays, plays that people could understand.

What was so great about this play, was the abundance of young kids, kids who probably know about Sam Shephard, maybe were even familiar with his work and came to see his pulitzer prize winning play. The five young girls in front of me, so young, bursting with fecundity, spoiled innocence and youth, loved it as did I.

Everytime I go to see a play now, I notice this odd generation gap. There was a show on PBS about theatre and the narrator said that theatre as institution is dying. He said the theatre needed to attract a younger audience to keep it going. I wonder if what he said is true.

The older grey haired qtip audience want plays that they can understand. The younger ones want to be shocked. Do the older ones forget that they too as youth needed to be shocked. Is that what happens when you get old, that after a certain point you can no longer accept new ideas, new things. That one day you wake up and you find that you only want to listen to music from your generation.

Isn't that what all those oldies music radio stations are about? Older people only wanting to listen to music of their youth. Older peope sneering at and hating the newer music and calling it noise. Didn't our parents say that that to us?

In college, there was a sign on one of the bathroom stalls in the Theatre building, which said "We are the people our parents warned us about." Perhaps it would be more fitting as we grow old for a sign like that to say "We are the people we hated as kids."