You can’t say you weren’t warned. The program for The New Group’s revival of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class features this advisory right up front: “Please note, this production contains strobe, haze, loud noises, the smoking of herbal cigarettes, live animals, fragrant smells as well as nudity, strong and graphic language, the depictions and discussions of violence and drug and alcohol abuse.” It’s the trigger warning of trigger warnings, and it’s enough to have the playwright spinning in his grave. After all, what’s the point of attempting to shock an audience if they’ve already been informed of everything untoward that will be taking place? It makes you grateful that no one onstage is eating peanuts, since the theater would probably have to be evacuated.
What’s ironic is that the real warning should have been to advise audience members that they’ll be bored to tears during the course of this miscast, indifferently staged, sluggish revival. Running nearly three hours, this production, arriving a mere six years after a much superior mounting by the Signature Theater in the same venue, feels cursed indeed. What it mainly provides is the opportunity to see such film and television stars as Calista Flockhart, Christian Slater, and Cooper Hoffman in the flesh. Unfortunately, they’re all upstaged by Lois, an adorable sheep whose program bio inform us that she appears annually in the Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas show. (Don’t worry, Lois, the holiday season will be here before you know it.)
Shepard’s 1977 absurdist dark comedy, dealing with themes of family dysfunction, the class divide and the rapaciousness of capitalism, feels both timely and timeless nearly fifty years later. But this play, like all of his work, is a tricky balancing act. It needs to be staged by a director and actors in touch with his distinctive, off-kilter vision. That’s not the case with this rendition which has the stale air of a vintage Fox sitcom. Except Married…with Children was more transgressive.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
The dysfunctional clan includes Ella (Flockhart), who’s fed up with her drunken husband Weston (Slater) and is secretly arranging with a sleazy lawyer (Kyle Beltran, who looks like he’s still in college) to sell the land beneath their crumbling home. Daughter Emma (Stella Marcus), whose first menstrual cycle is prominently remarked upon, is literally dragged through the mud by a rebellious horse. Son Wesley (Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour) desperately tries to maintain the workings of the family farm, although his methods are suspect. When one of the sheep develops maggots, Wesley installs the animal in a makeshift cage set up in the kitchen — cue the audience “oohs” and “awws.”
The perpetually empty refrigerator, into which the characters repeatedly peer forlornly as if simply staring will cause it to be stocked, becomes a symbol of the hunger afflicting them, which is not only physical. Weston attempts to alleviate the emptiness by bringing home a bag of artichokes he’s purchased during a road trip in the desert, but the smell of the vegetables boiling proves too repulsive even for him. The action takes place entirely in the kitchen, but that doesn’t prevent Wesley from casually urinating on his sister’s school project or Weston from taking a drunken nap on the kitchen table.
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” complains Ella at one point. But that’s not true of the play itself, which constantly surprises with the bizarre incidents and characters thrown into its chaotic mix. Those include Ellis (Jeb Kreager), the owner of a local bar who swindles Weston out of his property with the plan of turning it into a steak house and pitch-and-putt golf course; Malcolm (David Anzuelo), a police officer who reports Emma’s latest transgression; and a pair of menacing thugs (Kreager and Anzuelo) who come to collect Weston’s debt.
The three-act play, here condensed into two, has always felt a little long, and it feels longer than ever in this languidly paced production, running nearly three hours, that barely features any tension even when a shocking act of (offstage) brutality is committed. Director Scott Elliott fails to infuse the proceedings with the necessary tension, and he’s not helped by the ensemble who just don’t seem to be on the play’s wavelength. Slater, who always projects an air of intensity even when his characters are relaxed, comes the closest. Flockhart tries hard, and scores with some of the laugh lines, but she’s undercut by her naturally elegant physiognomy that just doesn’t scream “white trash.” And Hoffman, who impressed with his starring role in the film Licorice Pizza, just seems out of his depth here, not making much of an impact. When the three lead performers lapse into spotlight-driven monologues, they don’t seem to be acting as much as reciting.
Thankfully there’s Lois, who picks up her cues so readily that when Slater regaled her with a story about castrated sheep testes, she looked at him with such a forlorn air that the audience erupted in raucous laughter. Truth be told, the sheep (or lamb, as is usually the case) have always stolen the show in Curse of the Starving Class. But normally they don’t have it so easy.
Curse of the Starving Class opened February 25, 2025, at Signature Center and runs through April 6. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
