It would be spoiling things to give away the beginning—not the conclusion, but the very first moments—of Signature Theatre Company’s seething, sobering and at points very funny new production of Curse of the Starving Class. Even if you’re well acquainted with the Sam Shepard classic, written in 1976 and first produced the following year, you may not be prepared for the physical primal scream, achieved without input from any actor or naturally animate object, that opens this revival, directed by Terry Kinney, a prolific interpreter (as an actor too) of a wide range of great American playwrights.
Kinney’s last New York theater project was, in fact, a 2017 Broadway staging of Arthur Miller’s The Price, and this Curse, like this past season’s revival of True West, reminds us of the perhaps underappreciated parallels between Miller and Shepard. While dealing in very different milieus, both writers addressed American myths of mobility and prosperity, and how they are complicated by family dynamics and exploited by larger social forces—factors that never lose their relevance and, certainly in the latter case, couldn’t be riper for reflection.
How timely is Curse? Let’s just say that its most coolly despicable character is a real-estate huckster, a land developer empowered by banks and major corporations to take advantage of clients who, like the flamboyantly dysfunctional family at the center of this play, have not profited from experience or privilege. Middle-aged patriarch Weston, made unsettlingly vivid by stage and screen vet David Warshofsky, is an alcoholic prone to fits of violence, and in debt up to his eyeballs. His wife, Emma, played by TV favorite Maggie Siff (Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Billions), has disappeared into a dream of escape, involving selling their dilapidated house and the possibly more valuable land underneath it, and has enlisted the developer, Taylor, as her “lawyer.”
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Clashing ambitions extend to the couple’s children, Wesley and Emma, apparently named to reinforce the ties that almost guarantee to drag them down. Both are immediately suspicious of Taylor, to put it mildly, lavishing contempt on the man in the three-piece suit, at first a tastefully understated weasel in Andrew Rothenberg’s deft performance. “There’s something about you that’s weird,” declares the precocious, independent-minded Emma, given a brisk, desperate vitality by Lizzy DeClement. “Slithery.”
Taylor will reveal his true colors, eventually, in an outburst that suggests the enduring disdain the fortunate can harbor, on both sides of the political spectrum, for the disenfranchised. “Everything’s going ahead without you,” he sneers at Wesley, perhaps the most alienated family member, denied his mother’s regard or his father’s respect as he tries to preserve and nurture the property that both parents see as their ticket to easy street. (This includes tending to an ailing lamb, played on stage by an adorable and presumably healthy animal introduced on Signature’s site as Annie.)
It’s Wesley, played with a slow-burning intensity by Gilles Geary, who gets to speak for the playwright, indicting the system that has inspired Weston and Ella’s delusional trust and now threatens the very land beneath them. “It means losing a country,” Wesley tells his sister of the development deluge, predicting an onslaught of “zombie architecture, owned by invisible zombies, built by zombies for the use and convenience of all other zombies.” The late bard of the American West might as well have been referring to the pied-á-tierre-lined streets of certain Manhattan neighborhoods in 2019.
Wesley and other members of Curse‘s central family get revealing, searing monologues, none more so than Weston, who in Warshofky’s supple delivery is by turns poignant, bleakly comical and terrifying. As the actor stumbles about the towering, crumbling, barely-living space designed by Julian Crouch, lit with eerie bursts of color by Natasha Katz, we can practically smell the booze on Weston’s breath. Emma threatens Taylor by telling him her father has nitroglycerin in his blood, while Weston speaks of passing the poison he inherited from his own father to Wesley.
Weston and Ella nonetheless both speak brightly, albeit with stunning selfishness, of the future. It would be hard to imagine a more bluntly incriminating take on the latter than Siff’s; tense and shrill from the moment she appears, the actress pounces on her lines, and the other characters, when not merely disengaging from them. It’s a bold choice, especially in today’s climate, to highlight the less sympathetic traits of a long-suffering female character, but Siff and Kinney suggest a clear line between Ella’s behavior and everything she’s been through—and make plain the impact of all that on her own daughter, who ultimately suffers the most for her parents’ follies.
Likewise, while someone will surely decry repeated references to Emma’s first menstrual cycle as a “curse” as dated and sexist, they help reinforce the perspectives of characters who feel trapped down to their bones and blood, to the body chemistry and basic needs they invoke in various capacities. Crouch’s most prominent set piece and prop is a potential storage place for nourishment, a refrigerator, that remains bare through much of the first act. Characters open it, inspect it, speak to it, slam it shut in frustration; they’re mired in hunger, and not just for food.
So long as such exchanges are taking place—and with the gap between people having them and those invisible zombies seemingly growing by the minute—Curse of the Starving Class will lose none of its resonance, or its bite.
Curse of the Starving Class opened May 13, 2019, at Signature Center and runs through June 2. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
