A reformed Weston (Christian Slater, left) is concerned that his son Wesley (Cooper Hoffman) has been in a fight, in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class.
In the late 1970s, when playwright Sam Shepard decided to move on from his short experimental works staged at La Mama in the East Village, the Royal Court in London, and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, he turned to the American theater’s standby—a dysfunctional family. The result was the three-act Curse of the Starving Class. The disintegrating family would be the focus of True West and Buried Child, perhaps his two most famous works, but the seeds are already sprouting wildly in Curse.
In Scott Elliott’s production for the New Group (in two acts), the action takes place in the well-appointed kitchen of an isolated desert farmhouse belonging to the Tate family—set designer Arnulfo Maldonado has provided a KitchenAid mixer, fancy teakettle, a dream catcher, and plenty of cupboards—in keeping with mother Ella’s declaration that “we’re not poor. We’re not rich but we’re not poor” and “We don’t belong to the starving class!”
A smooth-talking developer named Taylor (Kyle Beltran, right) is enlisted by Ella (Calista Flockhart) to help her sell the family property.
The key fixture is a refrigerator that works overtime. Between family clashes, characters open the door, and stare at empty insides, for the most part, although food periodically appears to surprise them. Son Wesley (Cooper Hoffman) is the primary snoop, and it irritates his mother, Calista Flockhart’s marvelously drabbed-down Ella: “How can you be hungry all the time?”
Every member of the family, it seems, rubs the others the wrong way. Drunken father Weston (Christian Slater) is a loud, abusive bully who wants to sell the house, take the money, and go to Mexico. The dour Ella is determined to escape by secretly selling the homestead to a land developer, Taylor (Kyle Beltran), and resettle in Europe. Wesley is a sullen chip off the old block when it comes to treating sister Emma with contempt—he urinates on her school project. His eye is on Alaska—“the frontier,” he tells Emma. “It’s full of possibilities. It’s undiscovered.” And Emma has dreams of heading to Baja California and working in a gas station. Her father thinks she needs a change too: “Straight-A’s and you’re moldering around this dump,” he grumbles.
In a 1991 Village Voice interview, Shepard told interviewer Carol Rosen:
There [are] characteristics, if you want to call them that, that run through families that are undeniable. … The possibility of somehow miraculously making myself into a different person is a hoax, a futile game.
Weston and his wife, Ella independently plan to double-cross each other and start a new life. Photographs by Monique Carboni.
That psychological determinism sits cheek by jowl with grubby naturalism and dreamy monologues in which Jeff Croiter’s lighting singles out the speakers, who talk with the poeticism of Shepard’s early works, like Mad Dog Blues and Cowboy Mouth. But Curse also touches on Shepard’s familiar disdain for the trappings of civilization, especially in Wesley’s yearning for a frontier amid America’s steady urbanization. Taylor, an environmentalist’s bogeyman, describes it presciently: “The land is full of potential. Of course it’s a shame to see agriculture being slowly pushed into the background in deference to low-cost housing, but that’s simply a product of the times we live in.” It’s startling to hear Shepard’s language as pertinent as it was almost 50 years ago. It’s also noteworthy that the Tates’ home has no physical barrier between inside and outside, since Weston has smashed in the door. Strangers saunter inside, and Hoffman’s shuffling Weston brings a sheep into the family eating space and pens it up there. Although inside and outside blend together, there is still no escape.
Hoffman (left) delivers one of Shepard’s monologues interspersed in the play, while Weston lies in a drunken stupor.
The sheep isn’t the only symbol, nor the most obvious one, although her well-timed baas frequently stole the moment from the human actors on the night I attended. An eagle in a death spiral figures in a story, and there’s also Ella’s first menstruation—another kind of “curse.” And there is the fundamental hunger from the characters who open the refrigerator door almost ad nauseam to scavenge whatever is there. It’s a bit much to fit them all together.
Nevertheless, the actors do the play justice—in addition to the four family members, Jeb Kreager is a tall, menacing creditor named Ellis, and Beltran is smoothly confident Taylor, spouting words that haven’t lost a bit of their resonance:
You may not realize it, but there’s corporations behind me. ... People of ambition who realize the importance of investing in the future. … You people carry on as though the whole world revolved around your petty little existence. … There’s nothing you can do to turn it back.
Despite the odd mix of naturalism, poetry and melodrama in Curse of the Starving Class, Elliott’s production makes a case for Shepard’s continued relevance today.
The New Group production of Curse of the Starving Class runs through April 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre Center (480 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit newgroup.org.
