REVIEW: ‘Curse of the Starving Class’ is still stirring almost 50 years after its debut
Photo: Curse of the Starving Class stars, from left, Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart. Photo courtesy of Monique Carboni / Provided by official site.
NEW YORK — The New Group has revived Sam Shepard’s family drama Curse of the Starving Class, starring Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart, and the results are mostly stirring and revelatory. This dissecting view of an American family torn asunder still shocks some 50 years after its initial debut.
Audiences meet the Tate family as the play begins, and it becomes immediately evident that the mother, father, son and daughter have fallen on difficult times. They live in a rough-and-tumble house with cracked windows and garbage strewn about the floor. Ella Tate (Flockhart), with curlers in her hair, begins to make breakfast, while her son Wesley (Cooper Hoffman, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son) traipses around the bombed-out kitchen and dining room. They are eventually met by Emma (Stella Marcus), the daughter in the family, and later, completing the quartet, is the booze-raddled father, Weston (Slater).
Throughout the getting-to-know-you period of this family’s introduction, one realizes that there’s not much love binding them together. Instead, they know exactly what will upset their fellow family members, and they deploy various biting barbs for maximum effect, keeping everything in the dilapidated Tate household on edge and ready for destruction.
The plot adds some layers of suspense when Ella and Weston begin independently talking about selling the homestead, and a cast of supporting characters, a few of them charlatans, dare to enter the Tate household and see if there’s an advantage to be taken.
Shepard was one of the most daring and devilish of American playwrights. His stage stories, often centered on the lonesomeness of the American West, are studies of humans on the edge — with a definite feeling of dread and despair imbuing his darkly comic tales. This reviewer counts his works as some of the most thrilling examples of theater in the last 50 years, and Curse of the Starving Class is near the top of his long list of credits.
Scott Elliott’s production mostly works, though sometimes the teeter-tottering of this family saga doesn’t rise to the level of being necessarily towering. The acting is mostly solid, in particular from Flockhart and Hoffman, who have a large chunk of the first act together on stage. There’s is a sad, but sweet, connection between mother and son, but it’s also a fraught relationship that can shock the audience and cause theatergoers to reevaluate their initial impressions.
The play comes from the period in Shepard’s career when he felt longer was deeper. Toward the end of his life, it was tough to get the playwright to produce a show longer than 90 minutes. Starving Class clocks in at nearly three hours, and that length is felt by the audience, and not always in good ways. The Tate family is not exactly good company, and spending almost 180 minutes with them can cause one to silently implore the quartet to arrive at their inevitable conclusion a little faster. Still, there was never a time when a scene felt like it could be excised or where this reviewer felt like the actors weren’t giving it their all. It might be the nature of the show that spending time with a family that struggles like the Tates can be a tough watch, but still a necessary and stirring one.
Curse of the Starving Class, now playing off-Broadway through April 6, clearly shows that Shepard’s earlier work is still as vital as ever.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Curse of the Starving Class, written by Sam Shepard and directed by Scott Elliott, is a production of The New Group. Performances at the Pershing Square Signature Center continue through Sunday, April 6. Click here for more information and tickets.
