Not long after Sam Shepard’s discursive Curse of the Starving Classbegins rampaging along, Emma (Stella Marcus)—a young woman experiencing her first menstrual cycle—asks, “What kind of family is this?”
The answer is easy and obvious: It’s that quintessential American theatrical family: dysfunctional. Only Shepard’s four-member family piece isn’t like the four-member Long Day’s Journey Into Night family that Eugene O’Neill memorialized in his posthumously produced best American play of the 20th-century.
It’s Shepard’s attempt to one-up O’Neill—and, while he’s at it, just about every other indigenous American playwright operating so far in the overflowing theater annals niche. Curse of the Starving Class is about the dysfunctional family on steroids. It’s dysfunctional-family-issima.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
You’ve never seen its like on a stage, and neither have I in some devoted years of theatergoing. I’d never seen its like in 1978, either, when it first opened off-Broadway, after premiering the previous year in London.
I think that accounts for my highly positive response to it then (and once or twice since) and why my reaction to this revival—and why I’m writing so personally—is highly negative. I have rarely, if ever, changed my opinion of a play in all the years I’ve been scrutinizing them. And now I remain severely astonished at having made a 180-degree shift on the drama’s intrinsic value .
After giving this Curse of the Starving Class take much consideration since I staggered out of it, my reason for the turnaround seems entirely related to its initial impact. The shock waves accompanying the first viewing no longer seem to apply, thereby exposing the play’s action without the outrageousness it wore like a demon’s cloak then.
So, what bare bones are lying there? In addition to daughter Emma, The family members include wife and mother Ella (Calista Flockhart, back on a local stage after too long an absence), son and brother Wesley (Cooper Hoffman), and, making an obstreperous late entrance, husband and father Weston (Christian Slater).
Crucial is that none of this quirky, quaking quartet has much to say in favor of the others, although they have much demeaning to say directly to each other—and say it from the get-go in the perfectly attractive middle-class kitchen that Arnulfo Maldonado provides. They are so intramurally hostile that when, for instance, Wesley spots three charts sister Emma has dropped on the floor, he blithely urinates on them.
At the upstage middle of the kitchen is a narrow refrigerator that all four Tates open and shut repeatedly—that’s re-re-re-re-repeatedly—to bellow about their never having enough, or really anything, to eat. Only a spectator not paying attention will miss the symbol that the somewhat stocked fridge represents as the broader curse of the modern American family. Well, that’s Shepard’s bleak estimation, and many might agree.
What then transpires between and among the pointedly, similarly-monikered Ella, Emma, Weston, and Wesley over the course of Shepard’s three acts, presented here as two? It’s important to know that each is hankering to leave the others behind—Ella to Europe, Emma to Mexico, Wesley to wherever, and, also to anywhere they’ll have him, Weston, a drunk in debt to what seems like everyone in their Hot Springs, California neighborhood.
The pressing plot point has to do with selling their humble cursed home as the only means by which they can flee the soul-crushing area and, more immediately, each other. Ella thinks she has a lawyer-speculator on the hook and has spent one night away with him to seal the deal. She believes she’s clinched it but runs smack into a brick wall when Weston sidles in with $1500 he’s received from Alibi bar owner Ellis (Jeb Kreager) that will cover all his outstanding debts.
The mix-up has a kinda resolution that won’t be spilled here, as this Curse of the Starving Class tumbles into its second half. During that portion, Weston has a sudden, not long-lived revelation as a result of his sale (?) and decides he’ll make breakfast for all and remain in the house with his now fully owned Kaiser-Frazer outside. He’ll no longer need the lengthy therapeutic sleep he’s had on the kitchen table. In her turn, Ella discovers for herself the benefits of such a snooze.
At some moment in this last segment, Emma declares she’s waiting for something to happen (thereby speaking for the audience, too). Playwright Shepard—who’s already called for a live sheep (the attentive Lois) as well as nudity—provides such an outburst (special thanks to sound designer Leah Gelpe, lighting designer Jeff Croiter), but it feels too busily contrived, as does a stretched-out closing parable.
Where, then does the worrisome script leave director Scott Elliott and cast members? High and dry. The actors hurl themselves into their roles and so deserve gratitude for their ultimately unrewarding efforts. Slater gives his all as a destructive lush, and Hoffman does his burdensome share as the family member regularly called on to tidy things up.
At one contentious moment in the drama, mom Ella asks Emma, “Why are you so bitter all of a sudden?” Truth is, all four are constantly bitter, an affliction that transmits early on to a wearying reviewer.
Curse of the Starving Class opened February 25, 2025, at Signature Center and runs through April 6. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
