When a show begins with a set breaking into pieces, a production has a lot to live up to. Before the actors even step on stage, the revival of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, now at the Signature Theatre, awes the audience with a thrilling coup de théâtre that turns Julian Crouch’s grubby kitchen set, a monument to grease-coated steel and dingy linoleum, into a magnificent piece of wreckage—part surrealist fantasy, part ancient ruins. How on earth is a cast supposed to top that?
Quite easily, it turns out. As good as the actors all are—and they are all very good, especially Lizzy DeClement as the teenage Emma, who dreams of fixing cars and speaking only Spanish; Gilles Geary as her brother, Wesley, whose dreams are far more poetic than his earthbound day-to-day reality; and Maggie Siff (best known for her stints in TV’s Billions and Mad Men) as their head-in-the-clouds mother, Ella—this production’s best asset is undoubtedly director Terry Kinney.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
Of course, Kinney’s had plenty of experience with the late Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright’s work. Most notably: In 1996, he played the mysterious, mentally unstable Tilden in Buried Child on Broadway. In 1998, he directed the mythic, Mexico-set Eyes for Consuela off-Broadway. And in the ’80s and ’90s, at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre (which he cofounded), he directed, designed, and starred in A Lie of the Mind, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, Fool for Love, and True West. As my companion commented, Terry Kinney just gets Shepard.
And let’s face it: Shepard isn’t easy to get. These characters, in their squalid wreck of a home, could be easily dismissed. Ella’s idea of motherly advice is telling Emma to avoid buying “sanitary napkins” from gas-station bathrooms: “They’ve been sitting around in those places for months. Those filthy horrible gas stations. You don’t know whose quarters go into those machines. Those quarters carry germs. Those innocent looking silver quarters with Washington’s head staring straight ahead in profile. His handsome jaw jutting out. Spewing germs all over those napkins.”
Wesley is peeing on the kitchen floor—all over his sister’s beloved 4-H chart of how to cut up a chicken. And she can’t even finish her poultry project because Ella boiled the bird—which Emma had painstakingly nurtured “from the incubator to the grave.” And then there’s Weston (David Warshofsky, a tad over the top when he’s supposed to be sloshed), the patriarch, who stumbles in dead-drunk with a bag of laundry and a sack of artichokes (“Somebody’s gotta’ feed this house”) mumbling about his “desert land” before collapsing in a heap on the kitchen table. Oh, don’t forget about the lamb (played by a sweet-faced Annie) in the corner. She’s got maggots.
As Emma bemoans dramatically: “What kind of a family is this?”
Given all the crazy goings-on—the missing chicken, the maggoty lamb, the urine-soaked floor—it would be easy to dismiss these characters as a bunch of crazies, to exploit their eccentricities for maximum comic effect. But Kinney sees them for exactly who they are: Outsiders. Idealists. Fighters. Americans. An unremarkable bunch of people who just want a car to drive, a piece of land to farm, and a fridge full of food. Even when everything is burning to the ground around them—literally burning—they keep clutching to each other. Just to survive.
Curse of the Starving Class opened May 13, 2019, at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
