'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.”