'Stendhal Syndrome' (2004)

[Last night, Friday, 14 June, WNET, the Public Broadcasting System outlet in New York City, aired Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life, a documentary about the life work of the playwright, as part of the PBS series American Masters.  At the same time, McNally's 1987 play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, is currently playing at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.  I thought it would be a good time, therefore, to post an old play report from my archives of a production of one of his plays—actually two one-acts—which I saw in February 2004.  Think of it as a sort of tribute to McNally on the occasion of the début of his TV biography.  I suppose it’s a funny kind of tribute—since I didn’t like the plays!

[Note that this report was written long before I started Rick On Theater, even before I began writing the reports I sent to my out-of-town friends that eventually gave birth to the blog.  It’s much simpler and has none of the features I’ve incorporated since I launched ROT, most notably the review survey.]  

I saw the new Terrence McNally play (well, plays—they’re two one-acts) Friday night, 27 February [2004], presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, Theater A.  Ben Brantley’s review of Stendhal Syndrome in the New York Times on Tuesday, 24 February, and John Lahr’s half-review (he omitted the first play) in the March issue of the New Yorker both found great import in the second piece, Prelude & Liebestod, in which Richard Thomas plays a Leonard Bernstein-like conductor.  While he’s conducting the Richard Wagner piece of the title (the final, dramatic music from the 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde; the title literally means “love death” in German), we hear his thoughts and, to a far less extent, the thoughts of his wife (Isabella Rossellini), his first violinist (Michael Countryman), the soloist (Yul Vazquez). 

You know what?  I think Brantley and Lahr had their heads up their asses when they saw the play.  It’s self-indulgent crap as far as I’m concerned.  Like the first play, Full Frontal Nudity, about a group of American tourists in Florence viewing Michelangelo’s David with their guide (we hear their thoughts, too—but they also speak aloud and it’s very hard to distinguish which is which sometimes), I have to wonder what McNally’s point is.  The critics both dismissed the first play (Lahr didn’t even review it), and they were right to do so—it’s uncohesive nonsense, but both saw great things in the second, comparing it to McNally’s best work like Master Class (1995) and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), but I don’t see it.  I have no idea what he’s trying to tell me.

I hate to think I’m a prude these days, but both plays were extremely vulgar, and the second piece was nearly pornographic.  (The Conductor—that’s what he’s called—has a lengthy and graphic description of a bisexual bondage seduction that actually made me squirm.  I’m very glad I didn’t see this with my mother!)  Both critics, who glossed over this somewhat (though Lahr did quote one or two of the vulgar lines from another part of the dialogue), actually found the vulgarity a dramatic asset as it contrasted with the sublime (recorded) music of the Wagner (the sound work was from David Van Tieghem).  

Brantley even mentions that great talents often have great libidos (and small minds), but he doesn’t specifically mention Wagner in this context.  To be honest, I had a little trouble listening closely to the extended passage at issue here—there may have been some remark I tuned out.  (Neither critic said so, but I presume the same point applied to the contrast with the sublime Michelangelo in the first piece.  I imagine you can guess where some of the vulgarity comes from in this piece.  We don’t really see the David, by the way—it’s in the audience; we see selected and changing projections of various parts of it, which was an interesting technique technically/theatrically—but to little effect dramatically from my perspective.  Let’s put it this way: the means didn’t justify the end.)

(There must be something wrong with me—when I admire the David, the part I think of most vividly is the hand with the rock in it.  It’s just so real and alive-looking—it’s hard to believe that it’s carved from marble.  It’s the most remarkable example of the consequences of Michelangelo’s study of anatomy.)

Brantley and Lahr were right about two things: Thomas’s performance was the best bit of acting in the production and the second piece was a better play than the first.  My problem is that neither of these facts made a bit of difference to my enjoyment of the evening.  

Thomas’s acting was far more virtuosic than anyone else’s, but his was the only role that demanded or allowed that level of performance.  The rest of the cast did fine, professional, competent jobs in roles—they all had two each, by the way; Thomas had only the one—that didn’t require more than that.  

The fact that the first play was diffuse and unfocused, a jumble of ideas and bits than didn’t cohere into anything, and the second was better structured and unified is, for me, a purely dramaturgical conclusion.  I didn’t like it any better.  

(In fact, I got more pleasure, inadvertently, from the first piece.  At least it made me reminisce about the last time I was in Florence and went to see the David.  It was the summer of 1969.  We stopped in Florence on the way from Rome to London, and I’d been to Florence before, so I didn’t need the “tour” being offered.  I went directly to the Accademia and “watched” the David—that’s how I feel about that statue: “I’ll go watch the David.”  Because Michelangelo’s sculptures are alive—they move.  No joke.  Anyway, this had nothing to do with McNally’s play—it was just nostalgia.)

All in all, it was an extremely disappointing experience.  That’s two out of three for Primary Stages—the opener, A. R. Gurney’s Strictly Academic (also two one-acts), was eminently dismissible, too.  That leaves only one more in their season, Boy by Julia Jordan in the spring. 

By the way—I had never heard of the “Stendhal Syndrome.”  I wonder if it’s a “real” thing (like the Stockholm Syndrome).  It’s supposed to describe the rapturous effect some artworks have on the viewer/listener, a phenomenon the writer Stendhal (1783-1842) observed.  I wonder if it’s something McNally made up, or if it’s real.  [See note below.]

This was the New York stage debut of Isabella Rossellini, by the way.  (For those who don’t know, she’s the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and half-sister of Pia Lindström.)  I think it may also have been her English-language stage debut as well.  She did quite a good job, but she’s still having some problems with the words now and then—she stumbles and gets tongue tied. 

[I finally got around to Googling “Stendhal Syndrome”—I found nothing in regular encyclopedias or other reference works—and guess what?  It’s a real thing—and it was first described by Stendhal!  Whether or not anyone credits it as an actual psychological disorder is a judgment call, I guess, but it was later described in the 1970’s by a shrink in Florence who had observed it in numerous patients.

[It has been compared to the Jerusalem Syndrome (which I remember reading about before) in which fundamentalist Protestants, for the most part apparently, enter into a religious frenzy after being in Jerusalem for a day or so and visiting some of the biblical sites.  (They apparently start dressing in white robes and wandering the Old City preaching and praying.  They’re not dangerous, says the doctor who ends up treating them at a clinic in Jerusalem, but they do get fanatical.)

[I was in Jerusalem—Christmas 1982.  (I did a trip to Israel and Egypt shortly after the peace treaty was signed.  I sent Christmas cards from Bethlehem—the post office has a special window just for that!—and someone took a photo of me in front of the traditional birthplace of Jesus beneath the Church of the Nativity, because my actual birthday is 25 December—his isn’t; it’s just when many Christians celebrate it.)  I was overwhelmed by something, but it wasn’t religious ferver.  It was a sense of “ancientness.”  Jericho really got me—very, very old things do.  I felt the same overpowering feeling of being in the presence of ancient things at Stonehenge and Tenochtitlan in Mexico also.  Medieval stuff doesn’t cut it—it has to be older than that. 

[There’s also an Italian thriller flick called The Stendhal Syndrome (that’s the English translation, of course) from 1996.  (One of the principal characters, a female detective on the trail of a killer who gets trapped in the Uffizi Gallery, suffers from the psychosomatic disorder.)

[I rather like the idea of art making people a bit mad.]

'Octet'

On 5 June, I posted a performance report on Rick On Theater on a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1977 play Curse of the Starving Class.  At the very beginning of the report, I confessed that I was not a Shepard fan but that my bottom line for the Signature Theatre Company production was, “I didn’t hate it.”  Essentially, that means that I don’t really like Shepard’s work, but I managed to find some pleasure in this particular mounting.

Now I’m faced with a sort of reverse experience.  Right after I saw Curse, I saw Dave Malloy’s Octet, also at STC.  It’s a one-act, a capella musical (an hour and 40 minutes) about Internet addiction, and its form and subject—all the characters are computer geeks, ages ranging from early 20’s to late 40’s and include a multitude of ethnicities and backgrounds—was foreign to me.  (I use a computer, of course—I have a blog, so I must, right?—but to me, it’s a lot like driving a car: I know how to turn it on, gas it up, and make it go, but I have little idea how it actually works or what all the doohickeys and thingamabobs are called.) 

But I’m in a quandary—I liked what I saw but at the same time, I don’t really know what Malloy is trying to tell me.  So, now I have to compose a report on a play I enjoyed but which I didn’t really get.  Now, I’ve disclosed a number of times that sometimes when I don’t fully comprehend a play after I’ve seen it, writing about it clarifies the experience for me.  Let’s hope that this report will get me closer to understanding Octet while I work through the write-up. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a new musical.  (The last one, according to my records, was School of Rock in 2016, report posted on 22 September.)  Furthermore, though I’ve heard of several a capella musicals—In Transit (Off-Broadway, 2010; Broadway, 2016) and Perfect Harmony (Off-Off-Broadway, 2008; Off-Broadway, 2010)—I’ve never seen one so I didn’t know what to expect.

Signature’s production of Octet—for which Malloy, 43, is librettist, composer, and lyricist—is the play’s world première and is the first production in Malloy’s Residency 5 at Signature, which will include three productions over the course of five years.  (Malloy is the first musical-theater writer in STC’s residency program and Octet is the first musical Signature’s produced.)  According to the New York Times’ Alexis Soloski, Octet had its origins, at least in Malloy’s mind, in the social media reaction to the attempt of the producers of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, the composer-lyricist-playwright’s only Broadway foray, to replace actor Okieriete Onaodowan with Broadway vet Mandy Patinkin in 2017.  The cyber sphere chatterers forced LCT to close the show precipitously. 

“Mr. Malloy had always had his normal share of online addictions,” wrote Soloski, “mostly games, but that week he found himself compulsively refreshing his Twitter page, looking at what teenagers and strangers and robots had written . . . .”  That experience became the seed of Octet and the kernel of the song “Refresh.”

Soloski reported that Malloy wrote an a capella musical for several reasons:

Because instruments are another technology, because why would a band crash a 12-step meeting, because Mr. Malloy believes in writing the thing that scares you the most . . . .

The playwright says he took this last idea from dramatist, director, and filmmaker Young Jean Lee (writer and director of Straight White Men, 2018 Broadway play, and Here Come the Girls, 2013 short film), who begins writing a play by asking herself, “What’s the last play in the world you would ever want to write?”  “An a cappella musical about internet addiction fits that bill” for Malloy, asserted Soloski. 

In a note from Malloy inserted in the program, the playwright states, “Inspiration for Octet came from several books, plays, films, pieces of music, and games about technology, mental health, spirfituality, and the intersections of the three.”  He then provides a long list  of material on which he’s drawn from books like Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information and Stephen Sondheim’s Company to books on Tarot, podcasts, computer games, films such as Altered States and Blade Runner to music like Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives and Toby Twining’s Chrysalid Requiem.  (The list is long, and only partial, Malloy says.)

Scuttlebutt in the New York theater world alleges that Malloy wrote the play in six months starting last November and completed it in one draft, without multiple versions or revisions.  Signature’s practice is to engage their resident writers in the rehearsal process as much as the writer wants, and Malloy, working with the cast, made changes to the script right through previews.  In other words, if the talk is accurate, Octet’s rehearsals and previews were the play’s workshop (which is the main reason I prefer to see plays after the official opening!). 

Dave Malloy (b. 1976) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in the suburb of Lakewood and he credits his four years at Lakewood High School with providing him with his musical education.  Both parents played instruments—dad the sax and mom the piano—and the house was always filled with music and books.  At Ohio University, Malloy majored in music composition.  His theater career started in San Francisco in 2000 where he designed soundscapes for experimental productions in the Bay Area.  He was soon recruited to write songs for plays, graduating to complete scores for musicals. 

A 2008 commission from the Shotgun Players in Berkeley to write a musical with a company called Banana Bag & Bodice, a troupe formed in San Francisco but which decamped for Brooklyn, New York, in 2000, resulted in Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, which was a hit in the Bay Area and came to New York in 2009, bringing Malloy with it.  Following Beowulf, Malloy co-created and performed in Three Pianos, a “wacky assault on” Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, in the words of the New York Times’ Neil Genzlinger, for Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 2010.  The performance piece won a special Obie Award and had runs at New York Theatre Workshop and American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.  Eventually, this all led to The Great Comet in 2012, which premièred Off-Broadway in 2013 and moved to Broadway in 2016 where it received a Best Musical Tony nomination.

(When a theatergoer wondered if Octet might move to Broadway like Great Comet, one Malloy follower replied that “after Comet’s fallout, Dave has expressed bluntly that he plans to never have a show on Broadway again.”  I have no idea if this is accurate, but it’s understandable.)

After writing The Great Comet, Malloy composed Ghost Quartet (2014), a song cycle that premièred in Brooklyn under the direction of Annie Tippe (director of Octet) and then played at ART, in San Francisco, and at the Edinburgh Fringe, and Preludes (2015), a musical fantasy set in the mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff, that débuted Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater, the company’s experimental theater space atop the Vivian Beaumont.  According to Playbill, Malloy’s next project is a musical based on Moby Dick to be called Moby Dick, Part III: The Ballad of Pip, which will première at Harvard’s ART in December and January 2020.

The première of Octet started previews in the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, Signature’s variable-space black box house, at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row on 30 April 2019; it opened on 19 May and Diana, my Signature subscription partner, and I saw it at the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 24 May.  The production’s closing was extended twice from 9 and 16 June to 30 June at present.

Malloy’s play features a score reminiscent of an a cappella chamber choir and a book inspired by Internet comment boards and chat rooms, scientific debates, religious texts, Sufi poetry, and Tarot cards, among other diverse topics.

The playwright’s idea is to look at the notion that computer technology has moved so fast that humans can’t keep up.  Consequently, we’re suffering from an addiction and don’t see how to use the ’Net for our real benefit—as opposed to a momentary gratification.  Octet is meant to explore the addiction and nihilism generated by 21st-century technology and touches on isolation and loneliness among the ’Net-obsessed.  The characters are each addicted to different computer and cell-phone apps and sites: Instagram and social media; texting; Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, and other games; Reddit; 4chan; QAnon.  (I don’t even know what all of these are!  I confess to fuddy-duddiness.)

                                                         

There’s no real plot in Octet, in the sense of a cohesive narrative that proceeds from scene to scene with each one leading logically and causally to the next.  It’s a string-of-beads structure, with each of the eight characters (an octet, you notice) telling his or her story in song independently of the others.   (In a way, Octet is Kennedy’s Children meets Choir Boy.)  The play’s set up like an AA or NA meeting, except that all the attendees sing their “shares.”

Even the Linney’s made to look like the meeting room in a church basement and we enter down a hallway past bulletin boards with fliers and posters and one of those black fabric letter boards listing the events scheduled for the room, including an entry for “Friends of Saul” (the name of the group) at 7:30 (curtain time for the performance).  We enter the drab meeting room, which we have to cross to get to the seats, with a coffee table and more notices and posters on the wall, and the ubiquitous wooden hymn board.  It’s all sort of hyperreal and I actually thought it was kind of neat.  (The set is designed by Amy Rubin and Brittany Vasta.  As ROTters may know, I’m a sucker for that sort of theatricality.) 

Among the “Friends of Saul,” frantic and hyper Jessica (Margo Seibert) deals with the aftermath of a “white woman goes crazy video” that went viral, craving a reset in a safe place away from the shaming.  Henry (Alex Gibson), a gaming addict who obsessively plays the candy games like Candy Crush on his smart phone.  He’s outwardly lighthearted, but hides some demons.  Computer-whiz Toby (Justin Gregory Lopez) is a misanthropic paranoid who haunts conspiracy-theory sites  and argues with the Internet trolls who inhabit that cyber world.  Karly (Kim Blanck), an actress in her 20’s, struggles with on-line hook-ups but is frustrated by men’s inappropriate attention to her.  She’s anxious that porn sites are full of men who hate women and how this can easily lead to violence.

Ed (Adam Bashian), insecure and socially isolated, has problems with on-line dating apps, too, as well as Internet porn.  Velma (Kuhoo Verma), the group’s newcomer, sings of the benefits of Internet connection and how she found love in cyber space—but remains lonely in real life.  Group leader Paula (Starr Busby), who reaches out to Velma to smooth her entry into the group, is trying to cut back on her technology use at home, but her husband brings their cell phones into the bedroom, straining the marital relationship.  Marvin (J. D. Mollison) a neurochemist, has found that religious and spiritual miracles can occur virtually.  He and his fellow scientists experienced the appearance of God, who manifested to them as an 11-year-old girl dressed as a mermaid.

“Saul,” by the way, is the group’s founder—but we never meet him.  (The name of the group is supposed to evoke Alcoholics Anonymous, which is sometimes colloquially called “Friends of Bill W,” or just “Friends of Bill,” an allusion to William Griffith Wilson, a founder of AA.)  Neither has anyone in the group itself: he’s sort of a Godot-esque figure.  He always sends word he’ll come to the next meeting, but never does.  (Tonight he’s dealing with a “coding emergency.”)  He makes contact with the group members (by phone, evidently) to tell them where they’ll be meeting—the venue apparently changes periodically—and to assure that there are always eight attendees (an element of mysticism or magical realism because . . . well, how can you make sure of that?).  Aside from forming a musical octet, there are eight bits in a byte, the most basic element of computer programming.

There’s a wide streak of mysticism in the play—we’ve already heard about Marvin’s encounter with God and Tarot figures in it broadly.  In the program’s list of songs, each one, and therefore its singer/testifier, is identified with a Tarot card.  (Aleister Crowley, a British occultist and magician on whom I’m preparing a post, gets a passing mention, as does Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi writer who wrote the story on which Stanley Kubrick based the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  One character quotes Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) 

The production is really excellent.  I liked the acting/singing by the eight-actor ensemble (especially Bashian and Gibson, two cast members with gorgeous bass voices that just made the Linney rumble—along with my gut!), the stage direction (Annie Tippe) and musical direction (Or Matias), and the design (along with Rubin and Vasta for scenery—which includes the “corridor” between the Pershing Square’s lobby extension to the performance space/auditorium—there’s also Brenda Abbandandolo for costumes, Christopher Bowser for lights, and Hidenori Nakajo for sound). 

The performers are adept at vocal harmony, which I understand is difficult, especially when it’s close harmony (when each voice sings notes within a short range of the next singer), and handle several different styles of a capella singing.  (Each actor had a pitch pipe in a pocket, the only non-human instrument on stage.)  Even though each character’s share is individual, other group members—sometimes just one to make a duet, sometimes all seven to make a (yes) octet—join in and harmonize with the sharer—except for Velma’s poignant “Beautiful,” near the end, Malloy’s only solo.  (There is a number called “Solo” in the middle of the play, but it’s actually a duet between Karly and Ed, the only two characters who share a similar obsession—Internet porn and the perils of on-line dating.)  At “Friends of Saul,” support also comes in the form of musical support.

I was a little trepidatious of the a capella-musical idea, but it was very nice.  One theatergoer commented on a message board that “you don’t even notice there aren’t instruments,” and while that’s a little hyperbolic, it’s not far wrong.  (It’s less that I didn’t notice than that it didn’t matter.)  Malloy’s compositions range from chamber choir singing to hymns to harmonious songs and impassioned ballads.

In the end, though, I’d have to say that the lack of a narrative or throughline, the absence of any kind of dramatic tension, the one-dimensional nature of the characters about whom we know nothing except their Internet issues, the dearth of human connections among any of the characters would have worn very thin had Octet run longer than its 100 minutes—and the a capella score might have begun to sound stylistically repetitive.

My problem is two-fold, however.  One, the less significant issue, is that I’m not so into the Internet life that I understood all the jargon and references that are dropped in the script.  I’m also not convinced that there is such a thing as Internet addiction in the same sense as alcoholism, compulsive gambling, or drug addiction.  The bigger problem for me, though, is that I don’t really understand what Malloy is on about in the play.  We heard a lot of people—well, eight people, of course—explain (sort of) their individual obsessions (gaming, social media, porn, and so on), but I don’t know what Malloy is telling us overall.  What’s his point?  From what I gather about Malloy (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, 2012), he’s not an “entertainer”; he makes some kind of point, however idiosyncratic.  He tackles issues, so I assume there’s one here somewhere—but I don’t see it (yet).

Still, I enjoyed the work!  (Is that not strange?  Someone said that in a play.)

As of 9 June, Show-Score gave Octet an average score of 82 based on its survey of 27 published reviews.  (All Octet’s Show-Score statistics are very good, in my estimation.)  The site’s highest-rated notice was a 98 for Front Row Center, followed by four 95’s, including TheaterMania, New York magazine/Vulture, and TheaterScene.net.  The lowest rating, 60, went to Broadway Blog, backed by two 65’s for Theatre is Easy and the Hollywood Reporter.  Eighty-nine percent of the reviews were positive and 11% were mixed; there were no negative notices.  My round-up will comprise 19 reviews, including, as usual, a couple Show-Score didn’t collect.

Barbara Schuler of Long Island’s Newsday characterized Octet in her “Bottom Line”: “Elegant a cappella music, but a frightening look at our obsession with technology.”  Noting that the eight technology-addicted characters in the play “could be any of us,” Schuler reported that Octet explores “the perils of our collective obsession with devices.”  The ND reviewer thought that “the show asks a lot of its impressive cast, with each of the eight singers performing almost nonstop the challenging beats and harmonies required of this kind of music, while establishing their troubled characters.”  The performers are “all terrific” and the “music is innovative and varied.”  Schuler found that the “message derails near the end,” when Marvin recounts his meeting with God, but she acknowledged that Octet “is most definitely a cautionary tale and by the end,” and she was ready to abandon her own cell phone when she left the theater.

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness felt that “Octet’s technosceptic theme is echoed by the musical simplicity of Malloy’s quirky gospel-cum-folk numbers,” and observed that “there is no obvious order to these anecdotes of compulsion and anomie” as the play’s progress mirrors “the random drift of internet traffic.”  McGuinness judged that “Annie Tippe’s staging . . . builds steadily in intensity,” though the play “might have benefited from a slightly stronger narrative arc.”  The songs, though, “become progressively stranger, more anguished and more boisterous.”  The “no-frills songs and staging,” the FT reviewer found, “. . . create a sense that such a back-to-basics theatrical style can itself provide an antidote to technological pandemonium.”  McGuinness made the point that “Malloy and Tippe have crafted an austere-yet-joyful sanctuary from all the distractions beyond the theatre door.”

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley, playing the part of a member of “Friends of Saul,” informed us that “if you sit in on one of its sessions, you’ll feel reassured, alarmed, enlightened and truly thrilled by what you hear.”  Stepping back into his theater-reviewer role, he added, “If you choose not to attend, you will be missing what promises to be the most original and topical musical of the year.”  (This notice got only a 90 from Show-Score!)  Labeling the musical “sublime,” Brantley characterized Octet as “a portrait in song of perhaps the greatest David and Goliath struggle of our time,” referring, of course, to the Internet (AKA “the monster”) vs. “the naked and unaccompanied human voice, about as low-tech as you can get.”  Then he warns us: “Voice versus Void: You probably think you know the outcome.  You’re wrong, no matter which way you call it.” 

As for the no-tech score, the Timesman declared that the “layered and contrapuntal voices produce a dazzling spectrum of effects” as Malloy’s “score makes fractured thought audible.”  “What’s captured in these voices.” Brantley asserted, “is how we feel—seduced, exhilarated, lost and dirty—every time we turn on our computers or smartphones and fall into a time-devouring wormhole.”  In the end, Brantley’s left asking, “[J]ust who is this Saul? Is he even real? And why has he brought these particular chosen ones together?”  (The name is biblical, of course, the first  king of Israel in the Old Testament and the original name of the apostle Paul in the New Testament, but its Hebrew meaning is “one who is asked for, prayed for.”)  Brantley warned that the playwright “isn’t about to offer easy closure,” but the review-writer concluded that “I’m going to chalk up this beautiful, absorbing, disturbing work as a win for art.”

In the New York Observer, David Cote declared, “The wildly gifted composer-lyricist Dave Malloy likes his source material thick, baggy and potentially untamable.” Cote described Octet as “a kind of glee club meets twelve-step, the whole thing shrouded in cultish mystery.”  Warning that its “anthology approach can grow predictable or monotonous,” the Observer writer praised “Malloy and his shrewd director, Annie Tippe” for finding “a smart, engaging balance between satiric realism and exuberant theatricality.”  He reported that “Malloy never settles on one musical idiom or rhythmic approach” and proclaimed that “the blend of voices is sonic heaven.”  In the later part of the play, Cote found, the “already dense text starts to achieve data overload.” 

Cote asserted that Octet is “one of the most thought-provoking and soul-stirring musicals I’ve seen in ages” and felt that “it has an ingeniously woven, harmonically lush score that you’ll want to revisit.”  In the end, said Cote, after going through all of Malloy’s multifarious topics, frames of reference, and information, “instead of eyesore and brain-fog, my time with Octet made me feel more alive, more connected.”

I’m going to digress for a moment here, something I don’t usually do when I’m presenting the review round-up.  It’s clear to me that by this point in composing this report, I’m not going to come to terms with Malloy’s overall point.  But David Cote seems to have put together a cogent explanation that I can accept as a valid and worthwhile theme for Octet.  I couldn’t articulate it, but he has, pretty well, so I’m going to quote it here:

[The] globe-spanning network is an amazing achievement of technology, ingenuity, and human consciousness, which has nevertheless drained joy and wonder from life, made us more hateful, stupid and impatient.  Granted total control, the intellect will destroy the spirit; if all of human experience is contained in that doohickey in your back pocket, who needs the world?

I’m sure other viewers will have other thoughts about what Malloy wants us to take away from Octet, but Cote’s statement is as good as any I can imagine, and it satisfies me.  (Thanks, David.)

In one of Show-Score’s second-highest-rated reviews (95), Sara Holdren’s notice for New York magazine and Vulture, the reviewer called Octet “extraordinary” and said that it “uses a simple structure to go spelunking into a complex, ominous, continuously exquisite series of caves.”  Holdren holds that, from the “an online rage-storm” over the casting decision for The Great Comet, “one of the many exhilarating aspects of Octet is that it shows an artist making lemonade, turning painful experience into intricate, gorgeous music.”  The reviewer frim New York observed, “The marvelous actor-singers of Octet feel like tentative, searching acolytes—fragile little animals in the grip of a great god of their own creation, seeking a way out of a toxic kind of worship.”  Holdren felt, “Under Annie Tippe’s agile, imaginative direction . . . every one of the show’s actors is balancing a full, many-shaded character with a masterful musical performance.”  The review-writer’s final word was that “Octet is that rare and thrilling thing: a new musical that really does feel new.”  She added, “Formally, it’s both unique and invigorating—and it’s rigorous and straightforward enough in its structure for its ideas to spiral into rich, dense fractals.”

Octet “arrives with high expectations—and from its first moments it delights and transports,” pronounced Sarah Larson in the New Yorker.  “Like most of Malloy's works,” Larson explained, “‘Octet’ is maddeningly overextended by a song or two, but, over all [sic], his gorgeous music and prodigious gifts for synthesis—of voices, musical styles, humor, ideas—uplift and surprise in revelatory ways.”  She concluded: “When the outstanding eight-member cast sings together, it feels like exactly what theatre is for, and transcendently IRL.”

Frank Scheck, in one of the two second-lowest-rated reviews on Show-Score (65), said in his “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter: “Always interesting, but goes a little far afield.”  Scheck characterized Octet as “a thoughtful, if simultaneously overstuffed and underdramatized, exploration of an issue that couldn't be more relevant.”  The HR writer complained, “The show fairly bursts at the seams to include themes relating to religion, mysticism, philosophy and science,” which he felt was symptomatic of the playwright’s “overreaching.”  Furthermore, Scheck found, “The repetitive structure eventually becomes wearisome, with the lack of dramatic action preventing the piece from engaging the heart as well as the mind” and he had problems with “the sketchily defined characters.”  On the other hand, he felt, “The composer's talents, however, are on ample display in his stirring music and intricate, frequently polyphonic arrangements” and the “performers handle the complex, a cappella material beautifully . . . while also demonstrating crack comic timing”; he praised Tippe’s “unfussy staging.”  Scheck’s conclusion:

Octet ultimately doesn't live up to its considerable artistic ambitions, but the show once again reveals its writer-composer to be one of the most creatively audacious talents working in musical theater today.  It makes one eager to see what his restless mind comes up with next, assuming that he, unlike his characters, has enough self-control to unplug once in a while.

In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman delighted in observing, “Dave Malloy never stops surprising you.  His songs start in one mode, then veer into another and another.”  He dubbed the play “splendidly wrought,” describing the play structure “at first, episodic and confessional . . . .  But the show gets progressively spikier and weirder.”  By the end, Feldman reported, the play “explodes into full-on magical realism.”  Of the production, the man from TONY stated, “Under Annie Tippe’s taut direction, all eight bits of Octet’s byte-size cast perform Malloy’s challenging compositions with exceptional skill.”  In conclusion, Feldman wrote: “As Broadway shows increasingly rely on massive spectacle, Octet proves that well-polished pieces of eight are enough.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Brittany Crowell described Octet as “part chorale, part drama, part magic.”  Crowell went on: “It transcends form, creating a new, pertinent, relevant, humorous, and relatable way of storytelling.”  Just as I did, Crowell found, “The ensemble of the piece was spectacular.”  As the NYTG reviewer saw it, “Octet is less of a cautionary tale of the troubles of using social media, although this is a general effect of the piece, but an exploration of the new terrain that we find ourselves in, our struggle to contend with this new beginning, and an endeavor to find a balance through community and empathy.”

Crowell also posted a cross-reference to this review on Front Row Center, where Show-Score awarded it a score of 98, the play’s highest.  On FRC, Crowell characterized the play as “a genius exploration of our relationship with technology” which is “[p]erformed by a strong ensemble.” 

Carol Rocamora of Theater Pizzazz was thrilled to report, “Leave it to the talented, unpredictable Dave Malloy to come up with a surprising new topic and an arresting new theatrical form to fit it.”  Rocamora characterized the play as “the most original idea of the theatre season—a ‘chorus line’ of internet addicts, each singing their songs and telling their tales.”   The production, said the TP reviewer, is “[i]ngeniously staged by Annie Tippe” with a “talented ensemble of singers” with “beautiful voices.”  It’s “an immensely entertaining show” said Rocamora, “—that is, if it weren’t so unsettling.”  In the end, the reviewer declared, “It’s a healing new-age musical for our troubled times.”

For New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell dubbed Octet “a beautifully sung a cappella chamber musical” and he added, “So much feels so smart and spot-on about this latest theater piece from [Dave Malloy] that theatergoers may want to excuse the show’s excesses.”  But Mandell has a serious complaint.  He found that “rather than applying . . . intelligence to make an arcane subject accessible, as he has done in much of his work, Malloy too often attempts just the opposite in ‘Octet.’  He injects the arcane into what is to most New York theatergoers an inherently accessible subject.”  One example was the language Malloy put into the mouths of his characters, which Mandell found too “high-toned” and another was the introduction of the Tarot which he said “added nothing for me.”  The NY Theater writer, however, concluded, “Luckily, this first musical produced by Signature Theatre brings out enough of what’s best about Malloy’s work—thanks to Annie Tippe’s lively direction, the eight-member cast’s lovely singing, and the delightful musical direction by Or Matias—to justify the 100-minute respite from gazing at your screens.”

In Show-Score’s lowest-rated notice (60), Samuel L. Leiter said on the Broadway Blog that Octet’s “biggest problem is that . . . Molloy’s frequently brilliant music, sung by eight exceptional singers, fails to sustain interest without the support of an engrossing dramatic script.”  Leiter also complained that though only some songs “are clearly marked ‘hymn’ in the” program, “after a while, the reliance on a cappella gives them all a hymnal feeling.”  He added that “Molloy’s lyrics, filled with Internet terms (apps, blockers, trackers, refresh, swipe, memes, etc., etc.), range from clear to dense to opaque.”  Furthermore, the Broadway Blogger found that “there’s little interaction among the group and only a bare minimum of context for knowing any of these characters as people.  Dramatic action is nil, suspense absent, and boredom imminent.”  Nonetheless,  director Tippe “makes the most of her limited material.” 

In another 95-rated notice, David Gordon of TheaterMania labeled Octet a “thrilling and difficult work” which he thought is “like A Chorus Line—if A Chorus Line had been written in the style of an Annie Baker play.”  “Musically,” asserted Gordon, “Octet is Malloy’s most accomplished show to date,” with a “transfixing score” and “virtuosic and emotive eight-part harmonies.”  Gordon declared, “Simply on a technical level, it’s one of the most inventive scores I’ve ever heard”—though he caviled somewhat that “in some cases I wish [the songs] were as deep as they are prolix.”  The TM reviewer added, “Malloy’s book is just as crafty, but in subtler ways.”  In his conclusion, Gordon stated, “Octet is one of those rare shows that’s ambitious as hell and actually delivers on it’s [sic] promise.”  He warned, though, “It’s admittedly not for everyone—if you thought The Great Comet was impenetrable, this is even trickier.”  In his final declaration, Gordon asserted, “Octet ultimately delivers the one-of-a-kind feeling that emerges only when you’re able to lose yourself in a musical, as opposed to the black mirror you're reading this on.”

On TheaterScene.net, another 95-rated review, Joel Benjamin dubbed Octet a “sophisticated mass of brilliance” and added that Tippe shaped it around the sensational talents of a small cast which performs miracles of acting and singing.”  Benjamin’s final word on the production was: “This is an important jewel of a show.” 

Deirdre Donovan of CurtainUp exclaimed in her first line: “Hat’s [sic] off to the new Off Broadway musical Octet.”  “It is more original than most of the entertainments now on Broadway,” she added.  “Performed by first-rate a cappella singers, it has a pristine sound that is rarely heard in contemporary musical theater pieces.”  The play, wrote Donovan, “greets the eye with a plain tableau and the ear with sublime harmonies.”  The CU reviewer described the play: ‘It is a concatenation of hymns, chants, dirges and a fugue, all interspersed with some stylized dance movements that are extensions of the music.”  As her final remark, Donovan reminds us that “theatergoers are more likely to remember [Octet] for its down-to-earth message about unplugging from one’s hi-tech devices for a while to truly reconnect with people and reawaken to the wonders of the human voice.”

As it frequently does, New York Stage Review posted two notices.  In one, David Finkle acknowledged, “There’s nothing so exciting at the theater than suddenly realizing what’s unfolding before you is original.”  He warned, however, that “it may be that too much originality can have a diminishing effect, not a development often pondered.”  An example, said Finkle, is Octet, and “We’re mighty lucky to have it,” he added.  Director Tippe’s “done a crackerjack job.”  Finkle cautions that “the grappled subjects sound weighty—and are—but the substantial delicacy of Malloy’s music (and for the most part unrhymed) lyrics vitiates anything approaching the turgid.”  But NYSR reviewer A complained that this is “where all that originality starts to thicken.  Malloy dispenses so much of his brilliantly subtle music . . . that before the final fade-out his score threatens to evaporate into the old too-much-of-a-good-thing.”  In the end, Finkle makes a recommendation: “It’s not a bad idea for anyone interested in the best musicals—if not necessarily the most accessible ones—to meet in a hopeful, and in no way foolish hurry, at Dave Malloy’s astounding Octet.”

On the same site, NYSR reviewer B, Michael Sommers, bemoaned the poor choices currently available on Broadway.  “Perhaps like me, you wish for something fresh, original, and adult in musical theater that speaks to our current times and troubles,” he wondered.  His answer: “Look no further than Octet, given a bracing world premiere.”  Sommers proclaimed that the show is “so contemporary and smart—and challenging—that it’s unlikely to ever be a Broadway crowd-pleaser.”  He recommended that “if this sounds like something for you, grab a ticket now.”  Sommers reported that the a capella “music and performance . . . are developed way beyond mere do-wop into polyphonic glory as the show’s dozen or so numbers comprise a song cycle of wonderful variety.  The wordplay of these songs likewise is sophisticated and compelling.”  Further, “[t]he music, lyrics, book, and vocal arrangements are ingeniously crafted.”  But Sommers acknowledged that “nothing is perfect in this show-biz world” and he presented a cavil: “there are a couple of loose ends in this musical that need tighter integration.”  He referred to the references to Tarot and a couple of other small complaints.  Applauding “the all-around excellence of this production staged by Annie Tippe” and her “highly-talented” cast, Sommers concluded that Octet is “a remarkable new musical to be savored by audiences wise enough to appreciate its quality.”

“Melding naturalism with mysticism,” James Wilson found on Talkin’ Broadway that “Octet is utterly beguiling.”  He affirmed, “Director Annie Tippe makes terrific use of the space, and the eight-person ensemble is uniformly excellent.”  The TB review-writer found that “the singers' blended harmonies and vocal sound effects provide the stunning musical arrangements and underscoring.” 

On Theatre Reviews Limited, David Roberts wrote somewhat cryptically, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts in Dave Malloy’s a cappela musical ‘Octet.’”  Though he found “some of the addictions [exposed in the play] . . . readily recognizable,” making “strong connections to the audience,” he found “others like Velma’s . . . arcane references to Tarot and other addictive and destructive online spirituality communities become elitist and pretentious.”  He continued, “There are times when some of the threads seem without any meaningful content and become, unfortunately, lost on the audience.”  On the other hand, Roberts found Malloy’s “music . . . exquisite in every way.”  The actors, under Tippe’s direction, move “with Jungian synchronicity and the grace displayed in synchronized swimming.”  (I know what the latter is, but the former is another cryptic comment.  And by the way, how does Roberts know what the audience gets or loses?  Did he take a survey—or use telepathy?)  

'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.”