CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS Is As Timely As Ever — Review

Curse of the Starving Class is a perfect play for our moment. Now if only someone else were directing it. 

Sam Shepard’s surreal tale of family dysfunction and lower middle-class desperation is, perhaps, a play just perennially “of the moment.” First written in 1977 amidst a post-Vietnam economic slump, Starving Class captures a diminished, fractured United States, robbed of shared purpose and increasingly carved to pieces by corporate goliaths. 

So, pretty familiar. To say that Shepard’s work hits harder than ever in our divided, oligarchical times feels almost too obvious. But yeah—it hits. The legendary playwright and actor understood the American id on an essential, animalistic level. Starving Class captures not only the desperation of economic precarity, but the wild fictions it can drive one to embrace. 

How else could the Tate family’s alcoholic patriarch, Weston (Christian Slater), deny the danger of his piling debts around town? How would his beleaguered wife, Ella (Calista Flockhart), conceive a harebrained scheme to sell the house from under him and flee to Europe? Even their comparatively level-headed daughter Emma (Stella Marcus) is plotting a rash escape on the farm’s untamed horse. And as for her older brother Wesley (Cooper Hoffman), he seems naively intent on holding together a family that has clearly lost all moorings. 

To breathe theatrical life into this wild clan—and Shepard’s scorching dialogue—demands a degree of intensity that Scott Elliot’s production just can’t provide. Elliott’s reverence for Shepard’s text is evident, and he does capture its rueful humor. But as with his listless 2016 staging of Buried Child, the New Group artistic director can’t push his actors even close to the ferocity required. 

It doesn’t help that his starry ensemble is almost entirely miscast. Hoffman has a natural stage presence, and he does well with an early monologue delivered intimately on the lip of the stage. But Wesley needs some edge—and the gentle, teddy bear-like Hoffman doesn’t have it. As his sister, Marcus feels like a visitor from the 2000s, never plausible as someone who hasn’t seen an iPhone. 

Flockhart is wholly unconvincing as their desperate mother, registering as mildly concerned when the text demands verge-of-nervous-breakdown. In both her case and Slater’s, whose Weston is never credibly frightening, the production is a reminder of two well-liked performers’ limitations. Simply put, they don’t have the range.

Elliot’s slack pacing hardly helps. This is Shepard at a medium-simmer, with occasional flashes of heat. The locale feels unconvincing, with Arnulfo Maldonado’s design not even vaguely suggesting the neglected farm that supposedly sits outside. And an attempt to break open the staging at the eleventh hour feels half-formed, not terrifying as the text demands. When it still works, as it sometimes does, the text is doing the work. 

Through it all, at least we have Lois. The evening is nearly rescued by the Tate’s adorable 4 year old California red sheep, hustled on and off-stage as Wesley treats her for maggots. When Slater’s big monologue arrives, Lois thoroughly upstages him, drawing focus with each slow blink or turn of the head. It’s an actor’s nightmare—but a welcome distraction. 

Curse of the Starving Class is now in performance through April 6 at The New Group. For tickets and more information, visit here.