‘Curse of the Starving Class’

Watching Curse of the Starving Class as revived at the the New Group, you may spend just as much time as the members of the Tate family staring at the onstage refrigerator. They’re a cash-strapped — but, as they insist, not starving — California farming family that has much to eat, though they keep reflexively opening that fridge door, as if food might appear just because they deserve it. As a metaphor, it’s about as grandiose and hit-the-nail-on-the-head as the rest of Sam Shepard’s 1977 drama, which, in order to have a chance at cohering, launches into a near-operatic register of cowboy philosophizing and stays there for nearly three hours. The play is full of tumbling monologues, abrupt shifts between comedy and menace, onstage urination and onstage livestock, and a car bomb. If you let the audience stop too long to think about any of it, they might start to pick at the logic, scratching away at its stitches and seams. Why, for instance, in this production, is that fridge a rather handsome contemporary-seeming model, its LG logo visible in the upper right corner? Just how poor are these Tates? If that means director Scott Elliott has transported Shepard’s play to the present, which war was Weston fighting in?

I guess you could do a version of Curse of the Starving Class that manages to justify a pricey chromium-steel appliance, but though Elliott’s production advertises a “contemporary biting lens,” it lacks the overarching sense of purpose that would sync up the vision. To give that fridge the benefit of the doubt: There’s something in Shepard’s vision of corporate lawyers who entangle the Tates in loan debt and bad land deals that rhymes with the HGTV aesthetic of MLMs and other get-rich-quick schemes of our era. But this staging doesn’t flesh out that idea. It’s more interested in taking a cast of familiar names and putting them through a series of provocations. Calista Flockhart, as the matriarch, Ella, is playing against the mode of Ally McBeal winsomeness and aiming for frontier seriousness, spending much of the first act yelling at her children and making toast (and much of the second pretending to sleep on a table). But if it’s amusing to watch Flockhart throw artichokes across the stage, she’s less convincing at conveying real desperation. Given that we’re in the Central Valley, the aim might be to convey a Steinbeck-and-Didion California despair, but her posture, especially once Ella is hungover in sunglasses, is more reminiscent of Didion’s Celine ad. Christian Slater gets stuck in a similar mode as Weston, who is alcoholic, charismatic, and (theoretically) totally terrifying. The last part of that description might be the hardest to nail, and Slater doesn’t get there. He can be roguish, and he sure does yell a lot — everyone does; this is a yell-forward staging — but you don’t feel that he has nitroglycerin in his veins, as Weston insists he does, maybe just a strong nitro cold brew. Weston’s genetic inheritance, too, is meant to have been passed on to his son, Wesley, here played by Cooper Hoffman, of Licorice Pizza, who arrives with his own acting inheritance. Hoffman proves himself to be remarkably game, if similarly unfocused. Wesley has to pee on his sister’s school project and strut around the stage fully nude. Cooper commits to all the shenanigans; he’s got the fuel, but there’s a turn lacking to light the fire. In an early monologue, Hoffman sits at the lip of the stage describing a strange nighttime reverie among the avocado trees. It’s a moment that needs allure and danger, energies that are diffused by the semi-apologetic way Hoffman nudges aside audience members in the front row as he sits down.

Shepard hands out speeches like that to characters in Curse of the Starving Class one by one, and in this production, Jeff Croiter’s lighting focuses a spotlight on each actor as they get their big moment. Elliot may have been aiming for a feeling of immediacy with that choice, but double-underlining those speeches makes them each feel like more of an exercise. This may be a recurring problem with revivals of Shepard, as my colleague Sara Holdren noted with the last Curse go-round. Actors might love the cachet of trying to bull-ride a canonical work, but they’re not prepared for just how difficult a play like this is. Here, the monologues don’t erupt from the characters but instead feel like we’re in a scene-study class watching our classmates congratulate themselves on going big. And big choices, one after the other, get exhausting fast. Stella Marcus, as the Tate daughter Emma, who’s maybe smart enough to escape her family but is even more self-destructive, strives to match the energy of the bigger names around her but gets stuck in a similar rut of forced aggression. It’s better, in this context, to do less: Kyle Beltran, as the lawyer who seems kindly but has schemes of his own, stands out for his recessiveness, as do Jeb Kreager and David Anzuelo. They’re local characters entangled in the Tates’ affairs who, in the second act, double as heavies. When everyone else is giving away their energy trying hard to expound, it’s the stillness and silence that becomes most haunting.

To that end, the most distinctive performance in this Curse is all natural. The Tates have a sheep they tote onstage in the midst of their various arguments. A full-grown ewe named Lois, she’s a star with big dewy eyes, a melancholy turn of her mouth as she chews, and ace comedic timing. At my performance, when Hoffman first pulled her out and set up a little square of fencing around her, she seemed to react to her entrapment with real timidity and disappointment. When Slater’s Weston went on about his feeling of renewal in the second act, she turned her head ever so slightly as if to roll her eyes. The laughs Lois got in that moment were bigger and truer than anything else in the production, all because the sheep wasn’t trying and was just, accidentally, in the moment. How could you compete with a stage presence like that?

Curse of the Starving Class is at the Pershing Square Signature Center.