'Curse of the Starving Class' (Signature Theatre Company)

Readers of Rick On Theater may know that I’m not a big fan of playwright Sam Shepard.  After Curse of the Starving Class at Signature Theatre Company this month, I’ve seen eight stage productions of Shepard plays (including an earlier revival of Curse) since 1994, plus a TV broadcast of Buried Child (1978) in 2016.  As I stated in my report on Fool for Love (posted on ROT on 6 October 2014), “Despite his renown and his popularity with both audiences and theaters, I’ve never taken to him.”  (Other ROT reports on Shepard plays are “Heartless,” 10 September 2012, and “A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations),” 15 December 2014.  The latter was the dramatist’s final play.)  STC’s Legacy Program revival of Curse didn’t change my mind about the playwright; however, I’ll cut to the bottom line (and say more later): I didn’t hate it.

The world première of Curse of the Starving Class was at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s West End on 21 April 1977, starring Dudley Sutton as Weston, Annette Crosbie as Ella, Patti Love as Emma, and Brian Deacon as Wesley.  The play had been commissioned by Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the début production was directed by Nancy Meckler.  The U.S. première was  directed by Robert Woodruff with James Gammon as Weston, Olympia Dukakis as Ella, Ebbe Roe Smith as Wesley, and Pamela Reed as Emma; it played at the Newman Theater of the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival from 14 February to 9 April 1978 and won the 1976-77 Obie Award for Best New American Play.

Regional premières and revivals across the country and abroad included the Off-Broadway staging of Robin Lynn Smith; with Eddie Jones (Weston), Kathy Bates (Ella), Karen Tull (Emma), and Bradley Whitford (Wesley), 30 July 1985-16, February 1986 at the  Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (which later moved to Theatre 890 in what’s now the Flatiron District near Union Square).  The play returned to the Public Theater in April 1997, presented by STC at the Shiva Theater as part of the troupe’s Sam Shepard season; it was staged by James Houghton (STC’s artistic director) with Jude Ciccolella (Weston), Deborah Hedwall (Ella), Gretchen Cleevely (Emma), and Paul Dawson (Wesley).

In February 2000; Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut; presented Curse under the direction if Jim Simpson, with Guy Boyd (Weston), Kristine Nielsen (Ella), Mandy Siegfried (Emma), and Danny Seckel (Wesley).  The production used original live rock, blues, jazz, punk, and Latin-style music composed and arranged by Steve Bargonetti and Diane Gioia.  In February and March 2013, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven produced the play directed by Gordon Edelstein; with Kevin Tighe (Weston), Judith Ivey (Ella), Elvy Yost (Emma), and Peter Albrink (Wesley).

A film version of Curse of the Starving Class was released in 1994, produced by Trimark Pictures with a screenplay by Bruce Beresford.  Directed by J. Michael McClary, the movie starred James Woods as Weston, Kathy Bates as Ella, Kristin Fiorella as Emma, Henry Thomas as Wesley, Randy Quaid as Taylor, and Louis Gossett, Jr., as Ellis. 

The STC Legacy production is the first in New York City since the 1986 295-performance Off-Broadway run.  It began previews on 23 April 2019 in the Irene Diamond Stage in the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row and opened on 13 May.  Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I saw the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 17 May; the production is currently scheduled to close on 2 June (after an extension from 26 May).  I was surprised (not to mention embarrassed) at how little I actually recalled from the production I saw 22 years ago: just details here and there, but not larger moments from the play.  (I wasn’t writing play reports back then, and I’ve discovered that I remember performances more clearly more often when I write about them.)

In my Fool for Love report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2014/10/fool-for-love-round-house-bethesda-md.html), I included a brief bio of the author, but it only went up to 2014, three years before Shepard’s death at 73.  To bring that history up to date: Sam Shepard, author of more than 55 plays who also appeared in more than 50 films and over a dozen television roles, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrigs’s disease) on 27 July 2017 at his Kentucky home.  He was best known for the 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, True West (1980; Pulitzer nominee, 1983), and Fool for Love (1984 Pulitzer nominee) 

Shepard, who got his start in New York in the early days of Off-Off-Broadway at theaters like La MaMa E.T.C., Theater Genesis, and Caffe Cino (see my article “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, which mentions Shepard’s contribution to the beginnings of OOB), never really became a mainstream commercial playwright, despite several Broadway productions.  He won a 1984 supporting-actor Oscar for The Right Stuff and 12 Obie, a Drama Desk, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle, an Outer Critics Circle awards, and two best-play Tony nominations for Buried Child in 1996 and True West in 2000. 

As Curse of the Starving Class, which seems to be set in the mid-1970s when it was written, begins, the lights rise on a hyperrealistically detailed farmhouse kitchen.  (The set, which got a round of applause, is by Julian Crouch with lighting by Natasha Katz.)  Large—the room spans the 59-foot width of the Diamond stage—but run-down, pots and pans hang from the walls from which the wallpaper is peeling, grimy cabinets are filled with the accumulations of a lived-in kitchen, and the window panes are opaque with grease and smears.  Oh, and the upstage door to the yard is busted in and smashed, the remains all over the puke-green-and-dingy-white checkerboard linoleum floor.  It’s the set for a naturalistic play about a working family.  

But then, in a startling coup de théâtre, the walls of the room tear apart.  This is Shepard being Surrealistic, as no one takes any notice of the deconstruction, the playwright’s visual manifestation of the shattering of his vision of the American Dream.

As I observed in “Fool for Love,” Shepard was fascinated with the myth of the vanishing West and Curse is set in Southern California, probably around the area of Duarte, where the writer grew up working on a ranch.  Like many such places in the once-rural west, Duarte was originally a farm town when Shepard was a boy, but has become built up and urbanized as an extension of Los Angeles.  The Tates, the family at the center of Curse, are having trouble maintaining the farm even without the damaging family dynamics (as also symbolized by the house’s sundering); it started out as a sheep ranch but is now a failing avocado farm.  Now developers are sniffing around the property.  As in Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard often equates a troubled family with the loss of the American Dream of independence and self-reliance and the latter with the disappearance of the West of American legend and myth.

After the house self-destructs (or self-deconstructs), Wesley (Gilles Geary), about 18 (none of the characters’ ages is specified in the text), is putting the remnants of the broken door into a wheelbarrow.  Wesley’s mother, Ella (Maggie Siff), comes into the kitchen and they talk about the night before when Wesley’s father, Weston, broke down the door because he was too drunk to unlock it.  Ella starts to talk about a young girl’s first menstruation—which she calls “the curse,” giving another meaning to the word in the title which refers to the family’s straits.  Ella’s daughter, Emma (Lizzy DeClement), about 13, comes in, holding her poster for her 4-H project on how to properly cut up a frying chicken. 

Now that the four members of the Tate family have all been introduced—Weston won’t actually appear on stage for a while—I should point out that Shepard’s chosen the names for a reason; the symmetry is no accident.  Wesley and Weston are practically avatars of one another.  Ella even pushes the connection back a generation by pointing out that Wesley’s just like his grandfather in at least one aspect and toward the end of the play, Wesley has changed into his father’s old clothes.  The echo of ‘west’ in both the men’s names is also no coincidence as they reflect what Shepard sees as the West’s legendary past and its diminished present.

Weston, once a World War II bomber pilot, is a drunken bully, terrorizing the whole family when he deigns to come home.  (The playwright’s father, Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., 1917-84, was also a bomber pilot during World War II and his son, born Samuel Shepard Rogers, III, called him “a drinking man, a dedicated alcoholic” who “had a real short fuse.”)  Ella’d been so frightened the night her husband broke down the kitchen door that she called the police on him.  Wesley’s a younger version of his father—not as violent and not an alcoholic, but he torments his sister and scolds his mother all the time.  The only person who can cow Wesley is, of course, Weston; the son almost disappears from view when his father’s around.  When Wesley comes into the kitchen stark naked, no one even notices.

Ella and Emma almost seem like polar opposites: Ella’s full of the kind of fake knowledge we find on the ‘Net nowadays, which she passes on to her daughter dogmatically; Emma’s smart and ambitious—which gets her brother’s goat and he does everything he can to demean her.  But both women want to get out of their current circumstances and invent what amount to pipedreams to achieve their wishes.  Just as M follows L in the alphabet, Emma is the next step in Tate evolution after Ella—though neither woman recognizes this, resulting in almost constant friction between them.  (If Wesley is Weston 1.2, Emma is Ella 2.0.)

Emma looks in the refrigerator for the chicken she’d been painstakingly preparing for her 4-H demonstration.  She discovers that Ella’s boiled her chicken and, furious with her mother, rushes out, leaving the poster behind.  Wesley comes back and pisses on the drawing (an act at which no one seems outraged, just annoyed).  Emma insists that she’s going to take the horse and run away. 

Ella tells Wesley her plan to sell the house and move to Europe.  Wesley’s infuriated with his mother’s decision and Emma comes back and tells her mother she dreams of running off to be a mechanic in Mexico.  So we now learn of two of the Tates’ pipedreams about their futures.  We’ll soon learn what Wesley dreams of doing, but for now, he just wants to stay on the farm and make it work—almost as unlikely as his mother’s and sister’s fantasies.

Emma goes to the perpetually empty refrigerator—which becomes almost another character in the play—and asks why it never has any food since the family isn’t part of the starving class.  (In both productions of Curse I’ve seen, and I gather in all other mountings, the fridge is prominently placed in the set.  Here it’s stage right, alone and with the door opening upstage so that its inside is visible when it’s opened and the inside light attracted my attention.)  She becomes angry with the refrigerator and slams it shut. 

Of course, the starvation to which Emma and her family are subject isn’t a lack of food.  It’s a starvation of the spirit—the soul, if you wish.  They have no prospects and no notion of how to fill the void. 

When Emma turns around, she finds a man (Andy Rothenberg) standing in the kitchen.  He tells her his name is Taylor, he’s a lawyer, and he’s helping her mother sell the house.  Emma’s infuriated at this news and tells Taylor that her family has violent tendencies because her father and brother have nitroglycerin in their blood.

Wesley sets up a cage in the kitchen into which he puts a lamb infested with maggots.  (Yes, a real lamb.  It’s named Annie off stage, and it lives outside the city between performances and is handled by Schuyler Beeman for William Berloni, theatrical animal trainer.)  A drunken Weston (David Warshofsky) stumbles in with a bag of artichokes, which he loads into the refrigerator.  Weston reveals to his son that he owns land in the desert which he bought from a land speculator, but it turned out to be worthless scrubland.  Later, Wesley and Emma surmise that Taylor was the speculator who sold Weston the desert property.

While he’s building a new door, Wesley explains to Emma about the “zombie invasion” by “invisible” men like Taylor who are buying up the country with zombie money and turning it into “Zombie Land.”  Wesley reveals his own fantasy: to run off to Alaska, which he believes is still an “undiscovered” frontier “full of possibilities.”  (That makes three Tate pipedreams.) 

Weston returns, even drunker than before, and discloses that he, too, is selling the farmstead—and that he’s found a buyer to pay him cash.  The buyer’s the owner of the “Alibi Club,” where Weston does his drinking, and he says he’ll get enough money to go to Mexico where he can hide out from the men to whom he owes money (a fourth pipedream of a sort). 

Note that Alaska, only a state for 18 years when Shepard wrote Curse, and Mexico are stand-ins for the Old West, habitat of the rugged individual and the outlaw.  Only Ella dreams of a world of “High Art.  Paintings.  Castles.  Buildings.  Fancy Food”—another kind of fantasy land.

Weston also accuses his family of being afraid of him because they see his “poison” just as he saw his father’s.  Wesley tells his father that Ella’s also planning to sell the property and Weston explodes.  Screaming about “living in a den of vipers!  Spies!  Conspiracies behind my back!” Weston sweeps his dirty laundry and Emma’s new charts off the table, lies down on it, and falls asleep. 

Ellis (Esau Pritchett), owner of the “Alibi Club,” walks into the house and shows the Tates the $1,500 he’s paying Weston for the house—the amount that Weston owes to some “pretty hard fellas.”  Wesley grabs the cash and tells Ella that there’s not enough on which to go to Europe.  Taylor arrives and Ella tells him about Weston’s sale of the property, and Taylor insists that he’ll have the sale voided in court because Weston’s considered incompetent by the state. 

Sergeant Malcolm (Flora Diaz) from the Highway Patrol walks in and tells Ella that Emma’s been arrested for riding a horse into the “Alibi Club” and shooting the place up.  Ellis grabs the $1,500 from Wesley and runs out of the house as Ella goes to get Emma out of jail.

Having sobered up, Weston is folding his clean laundry on the table.  He tells the caged lamb a portentous story about an eagle diving down on the lean-to in which he was castrating lambs, trying to steal the testes he was tossing onto the tin roof.  When a tom cat prowls around the testes, the eagle grabs it and flies off with the cat in its talons; the two animals are locked in deadly aerial combat from which no survivor can emerge.  Weston refuses to tell Wesley the rest of the story, but he informs his son that he’s going to stay and fix up the house. 

Ella returns and begins to rant at Weston, but he tells her it was the night’s sleep on the table that fixed everything.  Ella pushes all the clean, folded laundry onto the floor and lies on the table.  She falls asleep as Weston goes on talking with his back to his wife and the door to the rest of the house, and Wesley walks in completely naked and carries the lamb outside unnoticed.

When Wesley comes back, his hands are covered in blood and he’s wearing his father’s old clothes.  He tells Weston that he’s butchered the lamb and Weston yells at him that they don’t need food because the refrigerator is full for once.  Wesley goes to the fridge, opens it, pulls the food out at random by the armful, sits on the floor in front of the refrigerator, and gorges himself.  Weston declares that he’s a whole new person, but Wesley warns his father that the men who are after him are going to kill him.  Wesley advises his father to escape to Mexico. 

As Weston leaves, Emma enters and asks Wesley why he’s wearing their father’s clothes.  He explains that as he put them on, he “could feel him coming in and me going out.  Just like the change of the guards.”  Emma then pulls out a wad of cash and tells him that she’s taking their mother’s car and “going into crime.  It’s the only thing that pays these days.”  Emma leaves and there’s a flash and a loud explosion from outside. 

Emerson (Rothenberg) and Slater (Pritchett), a couple of thugs, come in through a gap in the wall created when the house split apart.  (Remember that the separation isn’t real; no one has acknowledged the deconstruction.  It’s a leitmotif in productions of Shepard plays to blur the line between the real and the imaginary by having characters walk through fourth walls or other conventional barriers, wiping out the separation between the two perceptions.)  Emerson and Slater tell Wesley that they’ve blown up the car—with Emma in it.  The thugs tell Wesley that he is to pass the warning on to his father.

Ella, still half asleep, believes that Emma’s ridden off on the horse, and looking at the lamb carcass, asks Wesley to remind her of Weston’s story about the eagle.  They relate the end of the story in which the tom cat had come to sniff around the entrails and the eagle picked the cat up.  The cat and the eagle start fighting in midair, with the cat clawing out the eagle’s chest and the eagle trying to drop the cat.  The cat won’t let go because if he falls, he’ll die, so the eagle and the tom cat crash to the ground together.  Wesley and Ella sit silently, Wesley looking upstage with his back to his mother and Ella looking at the lamb carcass downstage as the lights go out.  Like the struggle of the tom cat and the eagle, it’s a hopeless situation in which there’s no winner.

I said earlier I’m not a fan of Shepard.  It’s a little like the way I feel about Harold Pinter: I can see why people like his plays, but I just don’t share the enthusiasm.  Shepard’s work just gives me problems.  But Signature’s Curse was generally watchable without being entirely satisfying.  At two hours and 25 minutes (with one intermission), it was at least a half hour too long, and director Terry Kinney’s first act (which is a combination of Shepard’s original first and second acts) is much longer than his second, which made me antsy even before the act-break.  (I once even thought act one was over when it started back up again!)  It may have been the production, but in the end, I didn’t walk away angry or numb, just disappointed.

Shepard leaves a lot of information unsaid and unexplained in Curse of the Starving Class (shades of Pinter!), not the least of which is the curse itself, to which members of the family refer but never define.  It obviously means something different to each of the Tates, but they never say what.  The result is that the play is not easy to understand (and I’ve seen it twice now) and can seem as if Shepard merely threw into the script all the incidents he thought of without connecting them up or winnowing them down.  One reviewer of another production quipped that Curse seems as “if O’Neill wrote a B-movie.”  Other analysts see a reflection of Aeschylus’ Orestaia trilogy, with parallels between the House of Agamemnon and the Tate family; I find the equivalence tenuous and a little pretentious.

Shepard’s popularity is predicated on his blending images of mythical American heroes, contemporary cultural touchstones (such as rock ’n’ roll, featured prominently in The Tooth of Crime but less so in Curse), poetic vernacular in the vein of August Wilson (but not at Wilson’s level), and dreamlike images and symbols that evoke a world not quite real but nevertheless recognizable.  (Some critics have called this Magic Realism, but it strikes me more as a combination of Surrealism and Symbolism.)  

And let’s not overlook his frequent breaking of rules and conventions (a guy pees on stage and then walks in naked?  Whoa!)—remembering where Shepard got his start: in Off-Off-Broadway coffee houses and basement theaters in Greenwich Village and the East Village. He broke stage rules, too, like having characters walk through “walls” and using rock music and jazz.  Many Shepard devotees are young theatergoers—or were when they first found the playwright.  

(Actors like Shepard’s plays because, aside from the characters which are challenging and fun to play, he writes long, juicy speeches that approach spoken arias into which an actor can really sink his or her teeth.  Curse has plenty of these for all the featured characters—but the trade-off is that this prevents the characters from talking to each other much.)

Curse of the Starving Class is not a star show, and Kinney, co-founder of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and a veteran of many Shepard productions, didn’t stage it as one.  It’s an ensemble play, and the Signature cast all delivered top-notch performances as part of the Tate universe.  None of us may ever visit there, but these actors all inhabit it—at least for 2½ hours.  The problem is, though, that Shepard’s characters each have their own ways of coping in this universe, so there’s little coherence and I felt I was watching at least four playlets that were intertwined but not conjoined.

Warshofsky’s Weston sets the tone for this world; everyone in the play is who they are or does what they do in response to who Weston is and what he’s done.  Warshofsky is a raging bull, with a volcanic temper—the nitro of which Emma speaks.  His best days were 30 years ago, during the Second World War and he now feels the world’s against him, conspiring to take what’s his.  Even as violent and mercurial as his Weston is, Warshofsky managed to eke out some sympathy. 

As played by Geary, Wesley is trying to hold onto his home and seems to be the only one driven to do this.  Geary’s angry, stubborn, afraid, and suspicious, but he seems to be the only member of the family who’s affected by what’s happening.  His sister, fiery, smart, tough Emma has big dreams and DeClement gives her a smart mouth to let everyone know how she feels.  Had she lived, DeClement’s Emma might have been played as a woman by the Lauren Bacall who matched spirits with Bogey in all those movies from the ’40s.

Siff’s Ella is the most lost of all the characters in Curse.  She doesn’t allow anything to affect her very deeply and quickly changes topics and switches moods. Ella seems to ignore what’s going on around her, but Siff suggests that she’s just trying to keep things beneath the surface.

As of 4 June, Show-Score had surveyed 27 published reviews and gave STC’s Curse of the Starving Class an average rating of 72.  The highest score was a 95 from Front Row Center, followed by a single 90 from the Walter Thinnes Blog.  Show-Score’s lowest-rated notice was a 40 on TheaterScene.net, backed by a 45 from New York magazine/Vulture.  In the website’s tally, 63% of the reviews were positive, 30% were mixed, and 7% were negative.  My survey will include 16 notices, several of which Show-Score didn’t cover.

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley reminded his readers that Curse “was the first in a rich series of family dramas of disorientation” from Shepard (the others are Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and 1985’s A Lie of the Mind.)  He reported that the play “features some beautiful, signature Shepard writing, in which primal desperation becomes fervid poetry. And the play now feels prophetic in its portrait of resentful Americans.”  Brantley found the first half of Kinney’s production “very entertaining,” but backed off by the end.  The Timesman labeled the production “top-heavy” and said, “The plot . . . seems to thicken like clotting blood.” 

Max McGuinness of the U.S. edition of the Financial Times declared of the goings on in the Tate household, “All these desultory shenanigans are entertainingly loopy.”  However, McGuinness asserted, Kinney’s “staging never quite attains the same pitch of inspired lunacy” as the recent Roundabout Theatre Company’s Broadway revival of True West earlier this year.  The “encounter” with the refrigerator in Curse lacks “the farcical energy” of True West “as food and blood are spattered about the place to no great purpose.”  The FT reviewer concluded, “The play then peters out inconclusively amid more heavy-handed symbolism.”

David Cote observed in the New York Observer that Shepard‘s style, once so startling and relevant, has turned “inevitably dated and overtaken by more alienated and atomized dramaturgies.”  He felt that the production “may be overlong and lopsided, but still throws off sparks of that crazy Shepard vibe.”  Cote described Curse as “a gruesome, gleeful demolition of the nuclear family and its fissionable discontents” and the director’s “staging is tight and propulsive, and he guides the actors to unlocking pure moments of animal magnetism.”   The Observer writer found that “for the long . . . first part of this production, Shepard’s black humor and the hard-working cast keep the gritty nonsense humming,” but then “things go truly bonkers and, sadly, dull.”  Cote summed up by stating: “The only thing that could save Shepard from himself (by the way, read interviews with him about playwriting; he didn’t want to be saved) would be deep, surgical cuts to his shaggy, digressive scripts.  Or bring in an audience of teens with an appetite for transgression; they might think it total badass.”

“Every time I see a fair-to-middling production of a brilliant play by the irreplaceable Sam Shepard,” wrote Hilton Als of the New Yorker, “. . . I leave the theatre with conflicted feelings.”  

On the one hand, I want you to experience the extraordinary power of Shepard’s alternately disciplined and unwieldy language—language that pulsates with a unique imagination—but, on the other, I don’t want you to see and hear what Shepard brought to the American stage in less than ideal circumstances.

Als went on to explain what he meant by this cautionary remark, but it’s too long and discursive to put in my blog report.  (Curious ROTters might want to read it themselves, however: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/emotional-malnourishment-in-curse-of-the-starving-class.)  “For instance, sprinkling sand on the stage to evoke Shepard’s edge-of-America Western locales . . . as is done in the current revival of” Curse of the Starving Class “does little to get at his genius, which was not about surfaces but about how people’s lives can be mangled by their belief in surfaces.” 

The New Yorker reviewer had similar misgivings about the opening coup de théâtre, which he felt made “too much of [Shepard’s] surrealism.”  Als found that the cast was “underdirected” so that “they compensate for it by either underplaying or overplaying their roles.” 

In New York magazine/Vulture (Show-Score’s second-lowest-scoring review at 45), Sara Holdren labeled Curse an “ugly, dreamy” play and, after warnings about restaging “canonical plays,” reported that “it’s a tough, flawed nut, and it’s not profiting from Signature Theatre’s current revival, which mostly plays the unwieldy material straight down the middle.”  She explained, “As a result, the play feels diffuse and almost plodding in its long first act, and the lurid transformations and deadly outbursts of its second act are consequently dulled.”  After “a kicker of an opening gesture,” Kinney “doesn’t push his actors to analogous extremes.”  Holdren admonished theatergoers that “Shepard’s not writing realism, but you wouldn’t really know it from the performances of Kinney’s cast.”  She complained that “Kinney and his actors never really shift into a grander, stranger tone, and without marked metamorphoses in the play’s texture—shimmers in its reality, like the wavering air above asphalt on a hot day—the text can start to feel baggy and stagnant.” 

“Believability is a terrible thing to be shackled by in a play like Curse, and that’s where Kinney has trapped his ensemble,” asserted Holdren.  She added that “after its first moments, this production never really challenges or expands our understanding of reality.”  In sum, Holdren lamented:

No one in the Tate family is headed for a happy ending, but as the hammers start to fall in the second act, it’s jarring to realize that the production has so closed us off that the horrible things that happen to its characters hardly register on the emotional Richter scale.  We’re somehow able to look upon the sick, symbolic depravity that infects Wesley—or the awful fate that eventually subsumes Emma—with the same level gaze with which we watched Ella cook bacon.  Our guts haven’t been invited to the party, and so, like the Tates, we stay hungry.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck reported in his “Bottom Line,” “A superbly staged and acted production of Shepard's blistering, bleakly funny play.”. The HR reviewer declared:

It would be nice to live in a world where Sam Shepard's plays were hopelessly dated. Sadly, the writer's 1977 absurdist dark comedy Curse of the Starving Class, dealing with themes of family dysfunction, the class divide and the rapaciousness of capitalism, feels all too timely in the Signature Theatre's superbly acted off-Broadway revival. 

Scheck went on: “Shepard’s plays are tricky balancing acts.  They need to be staged by directors and actors in touch with the late playwright’s distinctive, off-kilter vision.  That’s certainly the case with this production.”  With respect to the directing, Scheck found, “There’s nothing subtle about this rendition, which feels perfectly appropriate.”  He pointed out that the play “constantly surprises with the bizarre incidents and characters thrown into its chaotic mix,” but caviled that “a little of the quirky surrealism goes a long way, and it can feel repetitive over the course of two and a half hours.”  He also felt, “Kinney could have picked up the pace faster, and the decision to condense the first two acts results in an overly long, 90-minute first half,” but acknowledged that “the work’s raw power and bleak humor resonate strongly, thanks to the ensemble’s fully invested performances.” 

Diane Snyder, describing the play in Time Out New York as “darkly satirical,” reported that the director and cast “find memorable moments.”  Snyder reported, “Time has diminished some of Curse of the Starving Class’s shock value . . . and the Signature’s production doesn’t dig deeply enough into the feeling the play seems to be after: It doesn’t pulse with the agony of stunted existence.”  She went on, however that “Shepard’s potent writing, with its raw pain and rich symbolism, still resonates.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Donna Herman characterized the revival of Curse as “[i]mpeccably directed” and observed that the play itself was “prescient” when Shepard wrote it, quipping, “I’m sure it wouldn’t be a comfort to him to know it.”  Calling the play “darkly comic,” Herman asserted that Kinney “put together a dream cast” which she praised individually, along with set designer Crouch and lighting designer Katz.  (Herman posted a cross-reference to this review on Front Row Center where it was the highest-scoring notice (95) on Show-Score.  She added on FRC that she thought the production was “outstanding” with “impeccable” production values and “masterfully directed” with a “superb” cast.  She recommended, “If you’re a fan, go see it.   If you’ve never seen a Shepard play, don’t miss it.”)

As it frequently does, New York Stage Review posted two notices.  In one, Melissa Rose Bernardo cautioned, “When a show begins with a set breaking into pieces, a production has a lot to live up to.”  The she asks, “How on earth is a cast supposed to top that?”  Her answer?  “Quite easily, it turns out.”  She went on: “As good as the actors all are—and they are all very good . . . —this production’s best asset is undoubtedly director Terry Kinney.”  She complimented the four actors playing the Tates (after having praised Crouch’s set as “a monument to grease-coated steel and dingy linoleum”).  In the other NYSR notice, Elysa Gardner called the STC production “seething, sobering and at points very funny,” but wouldn’t “give away the beginning” (because, of course, no one revealed the big surprise of the set deconstructing)!  Gardner spends virtually her whole column in praise of the actors and Kinney, with a hat-tip also for Crouch’s set.

Michael Dale on Broadway World labeled STC’s Curse a “finely-acted” revival that opens with a “showstopping bit of stagecraft.”  On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovan labeled the STC production “a flawed revival” but recommended that it “should nonetheless be seen.”  Still, Donovan warned, “This production is not for the faint-hearted or weak-stomached.”  Donovan offered, however, “The big drawback to the current staging of Curse is that it pulls out the theatrical stops too early,” referring to Crouch’s set maneuver, and remarking that “no subsequent scene comes near to matching its frisson.”  She further complained, “Instead of grafting on his own pyrotechnics, Kinney should have trusted more in Shepard's language and the whole moving spirit of the play.”  Still, the CU reviewer held, “In spite of this directorial oversight, . . . this is a rare opportunity to see a live performance of Curse with an acting ensemble that Shepard would approve.  It might not fire on all cylinders,” Donovan acknowledged.. “But it sure does allow one to get a real taste of the late author’s genius.”

Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania asserted that STC’s production of Curse of the Starving Class, which he dubbed a “luxurious revival,” is a case of “design that outpaces, and even undermines, its script.”  “The richness of the stagecraft in director Terry Kinney’s production,” insisted Stewart, “feels obscene when one considers the story, about an American family on the brink of destitution.”  The TM review-writer listed the specifics of his complaint:

Certainly, it is fine for designers and directors of a revival to deviate from the original stage directions, but these expensive-looking alterations [on stage at STC] are to the detriment of the script:  Even the grease-caked walls make the set look more like a high-concept Airbnb than an actual crummy kitchen, especially under the beautiful moonlight created by designer Natasha Katz.  Sarah J. Holden’s costumes complement the color scheme almost too perfectly; and for people without much food, the Tates seem to have an awful lot of dirty dishes hanging over the sink.

“Unfortunately, Kinney's production amounts to extravagant working-class Kabuki: gorgeously stylized beyond all human recognition,” declared Stewart.  He found the opening set effect “breathtaking,” but saw it as “the kind of installation-art backdrop one might encounter at Park Avenue Armory.”  He complained, “Shepard never wrote his plays to be strictly naturalistic, but this play about poor people shouldn't feel like it was art directed for Vogue.”  Stewart also had problems with the performances, which he said “vary.”  He felt that Geary captured Wesley well enough, but he found deficiencies in DeClement’s Emma, whom Stewart said the actress played “like a tiresome sitcom kid sister, milking the audience for laughs that rarely arrive.”  The play “is still brutally perceptive in its dreamlike depiction of American society,” agreed the TM writer, “but it's hard to see that through the self-defeating opulence of this revival.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, James Wilson, characterizing the STC staging as “a full-throated revival,”  reported that the director “finds the right balance among the violence, dark humor, pathos, and poetry.”  Wilson praised the actors and Katz’s lighting and Holden’s costumes.  Joel Benjamin opens his 40-point review, Show-Score’s lowest for Curse, with a quandary:

Why the gifted Terry Kinney, of all directors, turned Sam Shepard’s seminal work, Curse of the Starving Class into Tobacco Road . . . is a mystery.  This production at the Signature Theatre doesn’t even rise to the level of that tawdry period shocker, a huge hit which ran for over 3,000 performances.

He goes further:

Kinney’s Curse is a sit-com version of Tobacco Road.  All the actors shout at each other and shamelessly play to the audience, an interpretation that drains the play of all subtlety and meaning.

“Kinney seems to have decided that the play Shepard wrote isn’t sufficiently meaningful or effective,” surmised Benjamin, “so he decided to exaggerate everything.”  Regarding the set effect, the TS.net reviewer asked, “Could there be a more heavy-handed metaphor for the fracturing of a rural family? . . . .  This choice is a ham-fisted gimmick not in the script.”  (Benjamin liked Holden’s costumes and Katz’s lighting.)  The review-writer’s final comment was: “The only reason to see this production of Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class is if you are a Shepard completist and just have to see this one.”

JK Clarke proclaimed of Curse of the Starving Class on Theater Pizzazz that

we cannot, in our present cultural landscape, recognize the personalities we see on stage.  They look like, sound like, dress like and listen to the same music as people we know or knew, but they and their problems scarcely exist any longer and are unrecognizable in a current context.  Consequently, added Clarke, “the play feels like a museum exhibit.” 

“On paper, Curse of the Starving Class is an intense ballet of family conflict and dysfunction in its most distressing and pathetic form,” asserted Clarke.  “But somehow . . . there is a lack of relatable pathos.”  The TP reviewer explained, “Characters don’t come to life in any sympathetic fashion.”  The writer acknowledged “that elements of Kinney’s production are powerful and add bona fides to the story,” however, “little else can be done to bring the anguish of the Tate family to life in any relatable way.”  Clarke suggested, “Perhaps now is no longer the time to produce Shepard plays.”

'A Particle of Dread'

Okay, this may be it—the play on which I want to report but can’t figure out.  It was bound to happen sooner or later, and at least I lasted over five years before I ran into this wall.  Sometimes writing about something actually helps me come to terms with the topic, so maybe I’ll still luck out.  I guess we’ll see.  Bear with me (or quit now and save yourself the tsuris).  After seeing Sam Shepard’s A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) at the Signature Theatre Company, I can’t for the life of me see what the point of it is and what makes it worthy of presenting to an STC audience. 

When I was studying dramaturgy, the then-newly developing theater profession that’s meant to function, in one of its capacities, as a sounding board and adviser for artistic directors of rep companies when it comes time to select scripts for the troupe’s season, I learned that the first questions the dramaturg or literary adviser should pose are:  Why this play?  Why here?  Why now?  I posit that someone either forgot to ask those questions at STC when the troupe decided to present Shepard’s A Particle of Dread, a fragmented take on Sophocles’ classic saga of the original dysfunctional family, as part of its 2014-15 Legacy season, or Artistic Director James Houghton blew them off.  (I reported on the first play in this series, A. R. Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn, on ROT on 1 October.)  I, at least, am at a loss to explain why anyone should offer Particle to a New York audience at this moment—or, really, any other time.  (The auxiliary material, both on the theater’s usual info board outside the theater and in its subscriber magazine, stresses the period of the Irish “Troubles,” of which the town of Derry, where the play premièred last year, was at the center, but I don’t see any substantive connection, so if there’s a rationale for doing this play in Ireland, I don’t see that, either.  Maybe I’m just obtuse, but Diana, my subscription partner, also didn’t see it.)  So, why did Houghton and Signature choose to produce Particle?  At least for the present, I’ll just have to make do with a Joe Friday report: The facts, Ma’am, just the facts.

Diana met me at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row on the rainy evening of Friday, 2 December, to see the U.S. première of Shepard’s 2013 play.  Directed by Nancy Meckler in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, Signature’s small proscenium house, the 90-minute one-act play had its world première at Field Day in November 2013 after being developed there largely through improvisation and workshopping.  It began previews here on 11 November and opened on 23 November; it’s scheduled to close on 4 January 2015 (after having been extended from a 21 December closing). 

Shepard has said that he’d been working on Particle “for years” before bringing it to Field Day.  Actor Stephen Rea and director Nancy Meckler had worked with Shepard a lot over the years, starting in 1974 when Rea starred in Shepard’s Geography of a Horse Dreamer at London’s Royal Court Theatre and Meckler, who’s gone on to helm a total of six Shepard plays, staged the playwright’s Action in London in 1974 and then Killer’s Head in New York in ’75.  When Derry, a city of about 84,000 inhabitants (Northern Ireland’s second largest, after Belfast) on the border with the Irish Republic, was designated the first UK City of Culture in 2013, Fair Day received a stipend to develop a project.  Artistic Director Rea asked Shepard if he’d like to do something with the company and the writer replied, “Well, I’ve been working on this Oedipus piece for quite some time.”  The “bunch of sketches that were loosely based on Oedipus” were developed improvisationally under Meckler’s direction into the script for A Particle of Dread. 

My reading of this situation, cynical though it may be, is that Shepard “was really having a hard time adapting” Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and had been struggling with it for some years.  (Nancy Meckler says he’s been “obsessed with the whole idea of Oedipus for a very long time.”)  Then Rea makes his offer and Shepard sees an opportunity to do something with the unfinished script and “finally,” he said to himself, “I decided I didn’t want to adapt it, I just wanted to do variations on the themes that were in the play.”  What that sounds like to me is the playwright, having found an outlet for the dormant script, rationalizing not being able to realize his full concept for the material and finding an excuse not to follow through on his original idea.  Shepard’s like a guy who sets out to build a boat and after years of trying and failing, ends up with a box.  So he says, ‘I really wanted just to make a box anyway’!  What the dramatist had left was a pastiche without a through-line or a theme, just snippets of an oft-told tale. 

In addition, the playwright essentially boasts of his structureless—read: rudderless—dramaturgy:

I’m a great believer in chaos.  I don’t believe that you start with a formula and then you fulfill the formula.  Chaos is a much better instigator, because we live in chaos—we don’t live in a rigorous form. . . .  That seems to be the thing everybody wants—sense. . . .   I don’t believe in adaptation.  I tried and I thought, eugh, I don’t want to do an adaptation.  I want to do a variation on.  I want to do something with the emotions that the play is calling up.  I want to take off on the feelings that the thing produces.  If it doesn’t produce those feelings, it’s worthless, as far as I’m concerned.  So in the case of Sophocles, he definitely calls up feelings.  That’s what you’re adapting: the feelings, not form—the instincts and all the incredible things that are called up.

That’s not enough, at least for me, for a full evening in the theater—not even a 90-minute one.  Unsatisfying is a mild way to characterize it.  Confounding is another way of saying it.

The play—and I’m not entirely sure that’s an accurate label for Shepard’s “bunch of sketches” (the New York Times called them “nonsequential shards of scenes”)—gets its title from an early line, which isn’t spoken in Shepard’s play, by the Choragos (chorus leader) in a 1949 translation of Oedipus Rex by American poets Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald: “If the killer can feel a particle of dread, your curse will bring him out of hiding!”  Shepard says:

The play has so many submerged and overt themes that have to do with family, fathers and sons, and murder.  All of these thematic things in it speak to themselves in a way, and they’re very ancient.  If you strip it away in a certain way it’s very American.  It’s very much about murder and rape and pillage—it’s not a pretty play—but it certainly speaks to the horror of contemporary life.  And that’s what I was trying to get at, improvisationally.  Not so much jazz music, which I think has kind of seen its day.

But that’s not really a cogent explication of the play’s point.  It doesn’t explain to me why the dramatist sees the Oedipus story as relevant to 21st-century American life.  If “family, fathers and sons, and murder” are so endemically American, how come we’re seeing so much of it playing out in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa these days?  It was all over the Balkans and the Caucasus not too long ago and may be returning to Eastern Europe soon.  I suppose the scenario Shepard lays out is typical of America . . . if your name is Gotti (or Soprano)!  In fact, the Laius character in the contemporary story is a mafioso casino boss, a “kingpin.”  Is that typical of our culture? 

The characters in Shepard’s play are mostly Americans (the classic Greek avatars of the Oedipus characters morph into the actors’ native Irish, I gather to evince their universality), but except for the cop and the CSI (yes, and we’re even near Las Vegas, setting of a certain TV series—though one reviewer invoked Elementary, the “latter-day Sherlock Holmes” series), none of them particularly ring “typically American” to me.  (The murder victims in Particle aren’t even gunned down—they’re run over with a car.)  They’re more like a foreigner’s idea of an American, like the American characters on those British TV shows we see on PBS.  Clearly, I’m missing something here.

The play’s story, if the fragmented narrative line can be called that, hews pretty closely to the Greek myth.  (I’ll assume that if you’re reading a theater blog you know the story of Oedipus.  If not, it’s easy to look up—and a review of the classic tragedy is helpful in following Shepard’s careening text.)  The time period jumps around from the classical era of Laius (Aidan Redmond), Jocasta (Brid Brennan), Tiresias (Lloyd Hutchinson), Oedipus (Stephen Rea), and Antigone (Judith Roddy), to what appears to be the 1950s or ’60s when “Otto’s” birth to “Larry” and “Jocelyn” is foretold, to the present when casino boss and drug lord “Langos” and his henchmen are killed at the side of a desert road near Cucamonga, California, in the Mojave.  The tale’s revealed non-linearly and disjointedly in what might be described as Shepardian Surrealism.  At one point, for instance, Annalee, the modern-day Antigone, taking on the role of Jocasta or Laius, decides to abandon her own infant son to die on a hillside because she’s afraid his future will be affected by the violence he’s witnessed at the hands of his father.  In Sophocles, of course, Antigone never marries and dies without bearing any children. 

Meckler makes the point that Shepard’s play is a “variation,” likening it to “the way musicians might explore themes in a jazz improvisation” (despite the playwright’s own rejection of this analogy).  The stage setting is a blood-stained, white-tiled abattoir where buckets of entrails are hauled about and clotheslines of intestines reveal to “Uncle Del” (the Oracle of Delphi, played by Hutchinson) the futures and fates of the characters.  Fundamentally, Shepard treats the story as a murder mystery:  “You know,” the playwright says, “the situation, to me, is a murder play.  Who created this crime?”  He even adds two cops to the classic Greek characters, a CHiPpie with a distinct Southwestern accent, Officer Harrington (Jason Kolotouros), and the crime scene detective, Forensic Investigator RJ Randolph (Matthew Rauch), who’s not above a little soothsaying himself (he reads forensic evidence like Tiresias reads entrails and bones). 

The Field Day Theatre Company, in the words of Ciarán Deane, an editor at Field Day Publications, is a renowned theater and publishing company founded in 1980 in the strife-torn city of Derry, Northern Ireland, by Academy Award nominee Stephen Rea (1992 Best Actor in a Leading Role for The Crying Game) and Tony Award-winning playwright Brian Friel (1992 Best Play for Dancing at Lughnasa) for the purposes of staging Friel’s play Translations.  Rea and Friel decided to present the play in Derry with the idea of launching a major theater company in Northern Ireland, supporting their conviction that theater can originate outside the big cities.  Every Field Day play has premièred in the small regional city of Derry and the troupe’s Translations briefly unified the many factions of the contentious community.  Following the success of that production, the company’s membership grew to comprise internationally-recognized Irish intellectuals including poet and Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney, author and critic Seamus Deane (now the troupe’s co-director with Rea), poet Tom Paulin, musician and filmmaker David Hammond, and playwright Tom Kilroy.  The theater company has presented a new production in Derry every year and then toured each one across Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.  

Field Day has maintained a two-pronged approach to its cultural redefinition of Ireland: theater and publishing.  In 1983, the company launched its first efforts at publication, a series of pamphlets exploring the political dilemmas of the country.  By 1990, the publications were becoming more substantial (and more political) and in 2005, the theater troupe inaugurated Field Day Publications, with Seamus Deane as General Editor, in association with the Dublin school of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.  Field Day Publications has so far published some two dozen titles on literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history, and 18th-century Irish poetry.   

Motivated by the breakdown of the society in Northern Ireland, which, since 1969, had descended into a pattern of rebellion and repression which lasted until the mid-1990s, but determined from its start not to follow any of the opposing ideological paths (Orange-Green, Unionist-Nationalist, Protestant-Catholic), Field Day sought to intervene artistically in the political and cultural discourse in Ireland.  Dismantling stereotypes through art and examination has been a key objective for the troupe, part of what the editors of an Irish journal dubbed the “fifth province,” a term alluding to Ireland’s four political divisions that designates an imaginary cultural space from which a new discourse of unity might emerge.  In 1979, Friel stated in an interview: “I think that out of [a] cultural state, a possibility of a political state follows.  That is always the sequence.”  

Stephen Rea explains that an early theater experience had been “a revelation”: “When I was working in theatre in the 1980s—that in a world of distorted languages, we were able to ask complex questions in this shared space, and that’s what theatre does so well.”  When Friel said to Rea, “It’s all about language” the actor replied, “What, theatre?”  But Friel said, “No, the whole thing.  The whole thing.  It’s all about language.”  According to Ciarán Deane, the playwright meant political conflict.  So, concludes Rea, “We just need to keep offering language.”  As the schoolmaster Hugh says in Friel’s Translations: “It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language . . . we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilize.”   For over thirty years since the company began, Field Day has sought to present an alternative analysis of received Irish opinions, myths, and stereotypes that highlights the shortcomings of the official line.  

Field Day’s repertoire contains versions of several ancient classics adapted for contemporary audiences, including Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1984), an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (directed by Rea), and Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990), a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (co-directed by Rea and Bob Crowley).  Shepard’s A Particle of Dread makes three classically-derived plays for the company.  “Our recourse to Greek plays is not just a theatrical action, but a deep need to understand what has happened to us,” declares Rea.  “These stories . . . deal with human and political situations that recur throughout history,” the actor explains.  “What the Greeks do is to elevate the discourse to a very high level where you’re not talking only about parochial little squabbles, and offer us the questions that we need to ask of ourselves in these awful situations.”

As with all Field Day plays, asserts Ciarán Deane, Particle explores a core idea of the company: that understanding language is the essence of understanding competing histories.  Whether read in ancient Greek, or in the contemporary American and Irish vernaculars of Field Day’s staging of Shepard’s new version, the Oedipus story addresses the collective guilt arising from unresolved historical trauma.   Deane, of course, is referring specifically to the Irish “Troubles,” the sectarian conflict about national identity that lasted from 1969 to 1998 in which over 3,600 citizens of Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants alike, were killed.  Shepard has said that the Troubles were “accidentally corresponding” when he was writing Particle, but director Meckler observes that Field Day’s rehearsals were “right near the walls of the city where you could look down on the Bogside neighborhood,” the site on 30 January 1972 of the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre (in which 26 civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army).  The company members could see the giant murals painted during and after the Troubles commemorating the events and personalities of that time.  “I met some Derry locals who disliked the murals as they felt they were celebrating the past,” recalls Meckler.  “They were saying, ‘We should be forgetting the past, we want to think about peace now.’  I mentioned this to Sam, and he said, ‘That’s it of course.  Everybody wants to forget the past, but you can’t.’” 

Stephen Rea adds that because Shepard was present in Derry for the whole rehearsal period, “he absorbed the history of the city as he walked its ancient walls each day.”  The actor observes, “It’s very hard to imagine that [the Troubles] never happened, but basically that’s what people are trying to do.”  As if echoing Shepard, Rea continues, “They are trying to ignore the legacy of thirty, forty years of murder and political turmoil rather than dealing with it.  Sam is such a great writer, he couldn’t be in a place and have that not enter the play.” 

On his website, Shepard, despite is earlier down-play of the connection between Derry and ancient Thebes, appears to corroborate Rea’s inclination:

The material we are using is pertinent to the situation here [in Derry] . . . . The notion of ‘place’ is very strong here.  There is where something happened.  We explore destiny, fate, murder, exploitation, origins.  The fact there is a wall round the city is part and parcel of what is going on in the play.  I don’t think there is anybody who cannot see there are repercussions with what is happening here.  It is important to have art and culture in a society go through transformation.  Something is happening here.  You can feel it.  Putting on this type of play here takes on a different significance than say if we were going to New York.  Where strife has been in the foreground, it is bound to have repercussions, or is bound to have meaning.

My own sense is that the Derry audiences may very well have zeroed in on these confluences, but over here, despite our own history and record of homegrown violence right down to the present (think Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, to name just two instances), I’m not convinced they resonate as audibly; Diana and I, for two, didn’t feel the connection.  The clearest explication of the theme of A Particle of Dread that I came across—I couldn’t get to it myself, I confess—was in one of the two notices on the Huffington Post.  David Finkle remarked:

In [Shepard’s] theatrical way he’s reiterating George Santayana’s quote, “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  He’s also paraphrasing Karl Marx’s quote, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”  Only Shepard sees it first as tragedy, second as tragedy—and third, fourth and fifth as tragedy.

The production of A Particle of Dread was still clearly affected by having originated in Derry, aside from incorporating the historical repercussions of the Troubles.  Working in Ireland with a cast of Irish actors (in addition to Rea, Hutchinson, Brennan, and Roddy are members of Field Day and the original Derry cast), Shepard and Meckler decided to use Irish accents for the classic Greek scenes and characters and American accents for the modern-day characters in the variations.  (As an acting problem, I can attest that that’s not as easy to do as it sounds.  Doing accents is a skill, but switching between two different dialects, especially when one is natural and the other adopted, is an exercise in MPD!  If the actors’ characterizations of American “types” is slightly off, as I suggested, their speech wasn’t.  Pardon me: I feel a little like Zoltan Karpathy right now.) 

(I presume when the play’s performed in Melbourne, London, or Auckland, the actors will use their native accents for the Greeks—but what will the cast do in an all-American company?  What will Canadian actors do, their natural speech sounding so close American?   Will they revert to adopted British accents?  Because, as everyone knows, classic characters—and most “foreigners”—speak Limey!)

Since I didn’t find Shepard’s play compelling as a drama, I had to approach it as an acting challenge.  This wasn’t sufficiently satisfying to justify the evening, however brief, but as a theater buff and former actor, I could derive some pleasure in watching the accomplished cast negotiate the performative puzzle Shepard sets them.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the Fair Day actors fare best—I’d guess because they’re probably better trained for this kind of pyrotechnical acting—I doubt Stanislavsky or Strasberg would help much in this performance—and have the benefit of having undergone the developmental process with the script and then having performed it for a ten-day run in Derry before taking the stage here.  (It’s also possible that the Irish actors are just more talented than their American colleagues, but I’m loathe to assert that.)  In any case, Hutchinson (in a series of very creepy turns), Brennan (who does manic pretty convincingly), Rea (a preternaturally calm presence), and Roddy (the ur-post-adolescent) present far more lively and complex characters and performances that do Redmond, Kolotouros, and Rauch.  Now, I hasten to add that the roles of Laius/Larry/Langos, Officer Harrington, and Forensic Investigator Randolph are less substantial parts, largely stereotypes (mob boss, state trooper, crime scene investigator), but the three men always seemed a little like caricatures.  Perhaps that’s Shepard’s intent—he doesn’t toe a realistic line and likes to play with reality and illusion, but that doesn’t imbue his writing with magical powers and characters with little depth are . . . well, characters with little depth. 

What the other four offer, however, isn’t a whole lot deeper—just more dynamic.  It’s a sound-and-light show.  We get to see peripatetic actors of some technical prowess morph mercurially among classic Greek nobles; distressed middle-class Americans; and confused and floundering crime suspects, witnesses, and bystanders in denial.  (One blogger, theater reviewer Don Shewey, described the performances as requiring the cast to “abandon any such thing as coherent characterization in favor of performance-art-like commitment to strong images and transitory moments.”)  That no one trips over his or her own jet trail as the avatars come and go is astonishing in itself—but in the end, it’s a quick-change pageant.  I tip my hat (if I wore one, that is) to the technical acting achievement on show, but as for the overall impact, I have to say meh.  What’s it all add up to?

I can’t really comment much on Meckler’s direction since I found the whole experience so lacking.  Obviously, she must take a great deal of the responsibility for that, alongside the playwright—even if that responsibility is for a lack of directorial control.  (The actors, too, if they participated substantially in developing Particle into what it is.  From their own accounts, it sounds like Rea, Meckler, and Shepard worked as a creative team—which may be why the show resembles a camel more than a horse.)  The action isn’t so much intense or fraught as frantic.  What it looked like to me is the kind of movement undirected actors indulge in, jumping about because they don’t know where to go.  (I’m not asserting that this is what’s going on, only that that’s what it resembles.  In my experience, actors who aren’t blocked do one of two things: they stand stock still or they wander.)

The set that contains the characters of A Particle of Dread, as I observed, is a blood-stained room bisected by intestines hanging from a clothesline propped in the middle by a forked tree branch.  The room’s completely covered in glossy, white tile and there’s a large, square drain in the center of the floor.  Uncle Del (the modern counterpart of the Oracle of Delphi) sits on a stool by a bucket of guts and bones and rolls knuckle bones to tell the future.  Frank Conway’s environment never changes even as the scenes shift from the roadside murder scene to Otto’s bungalow to the palace of Oedipus and Jocasta, and so on.  Conway’s grotesque abattoir may be the most effective element in the production, though I found the visual effect a tad over the top.  Michael Chybowski’s lighting is appropriately desert-bright and relentless throughout most of the play, and Lorna Marie Mugan’s costumes, while largely symbolic rather than literal (Jocasta wears a long, slinky, velvety gown of royal purple, for instance, and Langos is dressed in a sort-of ultramarine sharkskin suit à la the “Dapper Don”), evoked the characters and circumstances effectively. 

Shepard and Meckler made Particle a play with music and in a high recess (also tiled) at stage left sat a two-instrument ensemble, Neil Martin on cello and Todd Livingston on slide guitar.  (They were occasionally joined by Judith Roddy—Antigone/Annalee—on vocals.)  Martin composed the original soundtrack (and Jill BC Du Boff took care of the sound design) which punctuated the play with a kind of ominous and portentous drone that one reviewer called “banshee-noir compositions.”  (Another described it as providing “a sense of red-purplish fear,” whatever that means.)  While many reviewers and commenters found the accompaniment an enhancement of the play’s atmosphere, I saw it as part of the disjointed and disconnected nature of Shepard and Meckler’s production.  What it enhanced for me was the concept’s overall pretension.

Now, let’s turn to the published press and see how A Particle of Dread was received by reviewers.

When I do the review round-up for my theater reports, I nearly always start with the city and suburban dailies and then work through the weeklies, the entertainment press, and then the on-line reviews.  I’m breaking that pattern this time because one particular review of Particle sums up my own response to the play and production in one succinct paragraph.  (It was Diana who brought this notice to my attention, so I assume she finds the same agreement as well.)  It’s from the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column and, though I presume the capsule reviews are all written by Hilton Als, the magazine’s regular theater reviewer, they’re all un-accredited in the column:

Dread is right: Sam Shepard’s take on “Oedipus Rex” rarely lets up on the foreboding, egged on by a groaning cello and slide guitar.  The set (by Frank Conway) is all sickly white tiles, increasingly smeared with blood and guts.  The play originated with the Northern Irish company Field Day, and the director, Nancy Meckler, mixes actors from both continents.  The result is a mishmash of settings and tones, pieced together in short, cryptic scenes.  A chilly Jocasta monologue delivered in Irish brogue is followed by something more Shepard-esque: two detectives examining a roadside murder scene in the American southwest.  The disjointed quality seems purposeful, but the play might have had more gruesome power if Shepard had committed to a slant or a style.

I don’t necessarily buy the suggestion that Shepard could have improved the impact of the play if he’d “committed to a slant or a style”—I don’t know if that would actually help without other adjustments alongside—but the New Yorker has otherwise captured my sense of the production pretty precisely.  Below are the rest of the notices.

Ben Brantley, who, in the New York Times, invoked an “unlikely’ TV series called CSI: Ancient Thebes, found much more in the play to recommend it than I did, though he did equivocate a little (“Mr. Shepard is (I think) trying to get at the ways we all are all haunted by the primal myths that run through our civilizations”—emphasis added).  Brantley asserted that the play “is a restless riff on ancient themes that ultimately says more about its creator than its subject” which “makes it must-see viewing for students and hard-core fans of Mr. Shepard.”  Because Particle “often comes across as an antic intellectual puzzle, suggesting a Rubik’s cube being twisted every which way by a highly precocious kid,” continued the Timesman, the rest of us “are likely to leave ‘Particle’ bothered and bewildered”—though, despite the “handsomely mounted” production’s “theatrical flair and energy,” apparently not bewitched.   Set in “the slaughterhouse of history,” Brantley maintained, “The value to be found there remains as elusive for Mr. Shepard”: Annalee says, “I go around and around and around and around, and wind up here, right back here, just like you,” the Times reviewer observed, concluding, “That’s a fair summing up of the form and substance of this endlessly circular play.”

In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli captures my own confusion in her first sentence: “It’s hard to know what’s going on during Sam Shepard’s new play.”  The play, Vincentelli wrote, “always holds your interest,” however, with a “story [that] is now a noir thriller with touches of Grand Guignol gore and a sprinkling of surreal humor.”  With Meckler’s “efficient direction,” the “mix of brutality, humor and fatality stamps the whole evening.”  The Post reviewer demurred slightly, warning that “the show is less than straightforward,” but she summed up by stating, “And yet it works in its maddening way, especially since it offers plenty of Shepardian insights.”  Said Linda Winer in Long Island’s Newsday, Particle is “one of the more sober and obscure collages among Shepard's 50-odd, deeply scary, weirdly primal, often amusing works.”  She concluded, “Ancient myth mingles with Irish accents and desert-rat Americana in a play that is both compelling and pretty ponderous.” 

In the Village Voice, Tom Sellar called Particle a “somber new play” which “tries to relate the violent struggles in Northern Ireland to Sophocles’ troubled polis and our own homeland.”  Sellar complained, however, that “it’s hard to suss the dramatic significance of this collision of worlds.”  He warned, “Disorientation, rather than some kind of universal value, results from this dramatic mash-up.”  Further, the Voice review-writer reported, the production’s “a pauseless procession of inaccessible characters who talk at us without allowing us fully into their psychic spheres” because of “Nancy Meckler’s lethally muddled production” on “Frank Conway’s ungainly set design.” 

The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck, calling Particle an “oblique intellectual exercise” and “a series of jazzy riffs on its inspiration,” warned that it’s “likely to prove off-putting to all but the most adventurous audiences” because “the piece is frustratingly oblique rather than illuminating.”  Meckler’s direction “accentuates the stylized nature of the proceedings,” said Scheck, adding, “Audience members will find themselves baffled at times by the juxtaposition of characters and situations, which seem to have been tossed into a blender and randomly reassembled.”  Because “Shepard’s willful self-indulgence smacks more of an overeager university drama student than a seasoned playwright,” the HR reviewer wrote, “the mercifully brief evening never comes into dramatic focus,” despite the “undeniable imagination on display.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Joe McGovern warned, “Unfortunately, Shepard and director Nancy Meckler fail to sustain [the] dramatic tension, resulting in an 85-minute slog of a thriller so muddled that even its obliqueness feels predictable.”  McGovern explained, “The idea of Shepard . . . taking on an adaptation of Oedipus Rex bursts with promise . . ., though it’s uninterestingly mashed together with another narrative.”  After describing the gory, tiled setting, the EW writer emphasized, “The tableau should be frightening, but Shepard’s writing buries the rich nuggets of psychological horror rather than unearth them.”  He summed up his evaluation of Particle by complaining, “For a play about butchery, A Particle of Dread lacks fresh meat.”  David Cote dubbed the play a “fractured, honky-tonk retelling of the Greek myth” in Time Out New York and lamented that Rea takes “a valiant stab at a text that spins its wheels in the sand.”  The man from TONY characterized the play as “[c]ryptic, creaky and monotonous,” and Meckler’s staging as “too wooden.” 

In the cyber press, Elyse Sommer on CurtainUp noted that the script is “a far cry from a straightforward plot, but an hour and a half of bits and pieces—what jazz men call riffs” that harks back to Shepard’s “young try-anything, experimental mode.”  Sommer also described Particle’s structure as “often opaque ‘variations’” but felt Meckler “uses evocative images” to stage “the basically plotless play.”  The CU reviewer, however, found that “despite the skillful direction, evocative macabre atmosphere and sterling performances, Mr. Shepard’s aim to create a jazz-like riff on a famous myth, hits too many strident and ungainly notes” and that Shepard’s “A Particle of Dread takes opaqueness to a new level without being as compelling as his previous plays.”  David Gordon warned on TheaterMania that even with a familiarity with Sophocles’ original, “chances are you’ll be a bit puzzled by this alternately brilliant and mindboggling take” because the playwright “starts with a theme . . . and then riffs on it for a while.”  Gordon describes Shepard’s dramaturgy in Particle as “the jagged-edged fashion of someone trying to reassemble a glass vase that fell off a shelf and shattered into a million little shards.”  Consequently, the TM review-writer reported, “Any equation Shepard is trying to make between contemporary life and ancient Greek circumstances becomes so muddled in accents and plots that you almost lose interest out of frustration,” even though Shepard “constructs vivid characters in the barren, Beckettian landscape,” because “a crucial disconnect between text and production arises.”  Finally, Gordon concluded that “A Particle of Dread can hypnotize you.  That is, if you can figure out what’s happening.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray averred of A Particle of Dread, “If Shepard tells that story well enough here, he does not tell it subtly, twisting up the Oedipus narrative we know with a present-day rethink that doesn’t echo the original so much as copy it.”  The play, “for its virtues,” is “rarely” “a riveting evening,” asserted Murray, but it is “an intriguing one that inspires us to rethink our own attitudes and prejudices.”  TB’s reviewer capsulized his response to the play with a complaint:

If not for Shepard’s other tension-packing device, of intricately disrupting the timeline so that, at certain moments, you’re not sure who’s involved in the event you’re watching or when exactly it’s happening, there would be no notable deviations from the source at all.  This doesn’t exactly kill the evening, but it also doesn’t help it—you’re going to take away very little, if anything, from A Particle of Dread that you wouldn’t from a solid version of Oedipus Rex.

Though Murray doesn’t fault either the cast or the director for this problem, he does state that “the production seems to be trying to say too much, in too many different ways.”  Shepard’s script, on the other hand, “feels as though it wants to go further than he allows it,” even though, ultimately, “the saga retains more than a little oomph.” 

On New York Theatre Guide, Kathleen Campion opened her notice with a blunt admonition: “More than a particle of dread should attend any inclination to venture into Sam Shepard’s latest” work.  “To say it was freighted with pretension is almost harsh enough.”  (By way of example, Campion cites “[o]ne of the lines shrieked at the audience”: “Piss on Sophocles’s head”—and,” underscored the reviewer, “they certainly did.”)  “About halfway into the ninety-minute presentation,” NYTG’s review-writer reported of “the sea of confusion,” “my guest and I—and, I realized, a good share of the audience—took to shifting about in our seats.  We were trying to straighten up, pay attention, and ‘find the key’ to this puzzle before us.” 

The Huffington Post ran two reviews (both on the day after Particle’s opening).  Wilborn Hampton’s opinion was that the play is “grim and cryptic” and “one of Shepard’s most enigmatic plays,” “steeped in blood and horror and passion.”  The play “can be baffling,” reported Hampton, since “references to Sophocles’ great tragedy do not always follow a neat pattern, so that the audience has the sense of trying to put together a literary jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing.”  Still, said Hampton, “there are poetic passages that can chill and excite’ in A Particle of Dread, even if it’s “probably a better play than the staging mounted by Nancy Meckler” which “runs on low energy, as though Meckler and her cast were performing a dry revival of an ancient Greek tragedy.”  In the other HP notice, David Finkle acknowledged, “I’m of two minds about” Particle.  “In one mind, I think it’s terribly pretentious.  In the other mind, I think it’s terribly pretentious, but I’m willing to go with it in large part because of how audacious its pretensions are.”  Because of the connection to Sophocles’ classic tragedy, the HP First Nighter felt, “it’s tough not to be inexorably pulled into Shepard’s bold nightmare.”  “Right from the get-go . . ., he involves you.  You may resist,” admonished Finkle, “but I didn’t.”  Nonetheless, the reviewer admitted, “I can’t report that what he has [the characters] say is always crystal clear, nor can I insist a fair amount of the colloquy isn’t irritatingly hoity-toity.  But as played by the cast members with unflagging conviction, they never let Shepard’s fireworks fizzle.” 

I suspect that even among Ben Brantley’s “hard-core fans of Mr. Shepard,” A Particle of Dread will be problematical for many viewers.  It just doesn’t cohere, like parts of different bicycles crammed together to make one bike: it might ride, but it looks odd and it wobbles all over the road.