Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class is a major American classic that’s extraordinarily hard to produce well. I speak from personal experience, having seen three of the four past New York productions and directed the play myself at Hunter College. Tapping this work’s theatrical energies involves striking a very tricky balance between realism and nonrealism, sordid family squabbles and heightened, self-conscious mythopoetry, broad comedy and stream-of-consciousness oratory. All the past Off-Broadway versions settled on different tradeoffs of these elements, with differently fascinating results. And now Scott Elliott, in his New Group production at the Signature Center—whose formidable cast includes Calista Flockhart, Cooper Hoffman, and Christian Slater—has decided not to make the tradeoff at all. Instead Elliott discards the play’s heightened dimension entirely, treating nearly the whole work as brooding, portentous realism. This is Shepard as O’Neill.
It happens that Eugene O’Neill’s name was invoked by numerous critics when Curse first arrived. The play, written in 1976 and premiered at the Public Theater in 1978, was the first in a trio of American family dramas (along with Buried Child and True West) that broadened Shepard’s audience and transformed him from a counterculture curiosity into a mainstream star. On Joe Papp’s advice (his biographers tell us), this rock- and junk-culture-obsessed actor-writer of mystifying, bizarrely jagged, monologue-heavy crypto-melodramas decided to try his hand at a dysfunctional family drama set in a kitchen. Papp said it would pay! The results were a Pulitzer Prize and deep respect from a critical establishment thrilled to welcome him into the blessedly comprehensible American fold of O’Neill, Miller and Williams.
The truth is, the popularity and distinction of these slightly more bankable new family plays rested on their cheeky departures from the established patterns of American realism. Their sudden flashes of surreality, overt symbolism, overt self-consciousness, and sit-comish hijinks made them surprising, refreshing, and captivating to young people. Those qualities have continued to make them ring and sing on our stages ever since. What Elliott thought could be gained by eliminating all the buoyancy in Curse is baffling to me. It effectively returns the play to the leaden convention it so brilliantly helped enliven.
Curse of the Starving Class is set on a neglected avocado farm in southern California where home life is tensely chaotic and the parents, Weston and Ella, are both plotting escapes. The son, Wesley, wants to stay and keeps trying to fix things. The daughter, Emma, dreams of running away on the familiy’s insane horse, but is still too young. The place has gone to pot with Weston constantly off on benders and much-abused Ella stepping out with a sketchy lawyer-cum-real-estate speculator. Husband and wife are both plotting to sell the property out from under the other. That’s the comic surface. Beneath it is a tragic undercurrent of oblique absurdity (the boy pees on his sister’s school charts, a live lamb recovers from maggots in the kitchen, everyone compulsively opens and closes the fridge) and eerie-cheery, wacky-worrisome monologues that name the play’s themes and myths and feel like metatheatrical reveries.
The play absolutely has to retain lightness to hold us, and the main problem with Elliott’s production is smothering overseriousness. There isn’t a single laugh in the first scene, which is written as a sit-com-ish encounter between a ditzy mom (conceived as sort of pretty, conniving Edith Bunker) and a clueless kid cleaning up a door that his dad broke. Flockhart, who has played batty and detached before (in The Last Shot, for instance), acts Ella as entirely tuned in and seriously hurt and scared by Weston’s violence the night before. She’s all put-upon earnestness, with no connection to the role’s stereotypical “dingbat” dimension that other actresses like Kathy Bates and Maggie Siff have made hilariously their own.
Christian Slater’s Weston is also a truncated portrait. Slater plays him as a decidedly ordinary and human-scale blundering dad, knocking stuff over that Wesley casually straightens, yelling in a way that’s never really intimidating. He’s basically a decent wastrel, like your neighbor with an alcohol and gambling problem. But that won’t do. Weston has to be much more imposing and bizarre than that for the play to work. His grandiosity has to rise to the truly monstrous at times, evoking primal fear, mythic rage, and savage comedy. Those tools aren’t in Slater’s kit.
Cooper Hoffman, happily, is a natural for the role of Wesley, easily evoking both his dreamy side and his inner calm, which lingers even after his weird and violent break near the end when he seems to transform into a version of Weston. Unfortunately, Hoffman has no partner to make the brother-sister dynamic funny or believable. Emma is supposed to be 12 or 13, but the actor playing her, Stella Marcus, looks twice that age and lacks the abandon necessary to make her snappy comebacks and yowling tantrums amusing.
Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is a bright spot. He renders the kitchen as a disorderly, discordant, chronically unfinished renovation project. There are aspirational touches like a tasteful stove hood and island counter, but the side walls have exposed metal studs, the patio doorframe is only half painted, ceiling tiles are missing, and the fridge is too small for its niche.
The play’s many long monologues are always a big challenge in production, and Elliott’s solution is to have almost all of them delivered directly to the audience as asides and soliloquies. When Hoffman began the first one this way, seated on the edge of the stage, I perked up, briefly hoping this convention might be a source of the bright comic punch that the show clearly needed. In the end, though, the monologues only add to the deadly self-seriousness. All but one are spoken gravely and reverently like nuggets of PROFOUND POETIC PHILOSOPHY by the sage SAM SHEPARD—uttering profund apercus about America, The Family, Violence, Greed, The Frontier, and more from the grave. Any show would sag under this weight.
The one exception is the famous monologue that begins the last act about an eagle dive-bombing a shed roof. Weston tells this demented story to the lamb while folding laundry, and it’s particularly touching in this production because Slater’s sobered up Weston connects improbably well with the lamb—petting it, nuzzling it, even getting what look like specific reactions from it. He seems to have bonded more tenderly with this animal than with any of the humans in his life, and then moments later, when Flockhart’s Ella enters exhausted after spending the night with Emma in jail, he extends the same tenderness to her. This is a touching surprise. Fleetingly and movingly, we see into the loving marriage these two once had.
During that scene, I found myself thinking that Elliott may well have cast Flockhart and Slater primarily for that section of the play. He knew they could conjure the peaceful calm before the action’s awful culminating storm as poignantly as any actors alive. What they couldn’t do, alas, is ever meaningfully inhabit the silly clown car that powers Curse’s action right up to that point.
Photos: Monique Carboni
By Sam Shepard
Directed by Scott Elliott
The New Group at Pershing Square Signature Center
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