"Curse of the Starving Class' at the Wilma (2nd review)

Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class is a fascinating juxtaposition of realism and surrealism. An interplay of family issues is expressed with grit and soaring soliloquies ("I could feel this country close, like it was part of my bones. I could smell the avocado blossoms....").

As an added attraction, the drama addresses socio-economic problems that are even more current than when the play was written in 1977. Shepard wrote about a system that's tilted in favor of those on top, and problems caused by sub-prime mortgage speculation.

"The whole thing's geared to invisible money," Shepard's main character said (in 1977!). "It's all plastic shuffling back and forth...so...why not go in debt for a few grand, if all it is is numbers?"

Curse chronicles post-World War II land development as we see a family go into debt to buy a home and a tract of barren wasteland. "Banks are loaning money right, left and center," Ella tells her son Wesley. The central figure, Weston, is similar to some other Shepard characters: an absent father living on the edge of an American desert.

Shepard's father

As in other Shepard plays, his people fret about generational inheritance— in particular, the father-son relationship. The playwright himself, born as Samuel Shepard Rogers IV, has long tried to separate himself from his hierarchal family structure, including dropping his last name. Curse is fiction, but Shepard's script invokes places and events from his own life.

Weston and Ella are stuck in a deteriorated marriage. Each of them tries to sell their farmhouse without the other's knowledge while exploitative creditors and land developers close in on them. Ella cooks and eats her daughter's pet chicken and prepares to ditch the whole family. The teenage children alternate between trying to fix things and trying to escape.

The characters aren't the type I'd hang out with, and their actions are off-putting to the extreme: urinating on a sister's school project, literally stuffing one's face with food, and slaughtering a lamb. Yet there's something mesmerizing about their struggles.

In his irrational anger about how things turned out, Weston is a forerunner of today's Tea Partyers, who tell the government to "Keep your hands off of my Medicare." The play won't work unless we find something sympathetic in him. Past actors have portrayed him as obnoxious. Here, Bruce McKenzie portrays Weston as pitiable. He's a victim of a system that's rigged against him as he incurs debts he can't repay.

Defective fighter plane

"I always figured on the future," Weston says in the climactic scene in Act II, "I banked on it. I was banking on it getting better. It couldn't get worse, so I figured it'd get better. I figured that's why everyone wants you to buy things. Buy refrigerators. Buy cars, houses, lots, invest."

Weston is a disillusioned World War II veteran, a hero-figure who's been discarded. He speaks specifically of having piloted a P-49, a single-seat fighter plane. Surely it's no coincidence that the P-49 was notorious for a history of controls that locked up during high-speed dives, causing violent buffeting and many fatalities.

Curse of the Starving Class is bleak, acrid and at times funny. It can give you shivers.

In addition to the superb McKenzie, Nate Miller, Lorri Holt and Keira Keely embody the family. Among the supporting cast, Ed Swidey is particularly colorful as a rapacious gambler, as is Peter Schmitz as a sleazy realtor. Richard Hamburger directed with a good sense for balancing the grim with the absurd.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.