"Curse of the Starving Class' at the Wilma (3rd review)

The family is the most perdurable and embattled of all human institutions, and therefore the stuff in one way or another of most of the world's great drama, from Oedipus Rex, Medea and Antigone to Hamlet and King Lear to Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman. In all these cases, it's not the family alone but its relation to a wider society that creates the framework of conflict.

This is the case as well with Sam Shepard, whose major works all center on an imploding nuclear family. Shepard doesn't seem so much to describe the family as to blow it up onstage, and to judge from Matt Saunders' set, the explosion already seems to have taken place before the Wilma's revival of Curse of the Starving Class begins.

Upended furniture is strewn about, the front door is busted in, and the interior scene is open to the four winds. This is the home of "Weston," whose name not so subtly suggests the butt end of the California dream.

The master himself is not at home, having gone off on one of his spectacular benders, but we meet his wife Ella, who is busy scheming with a local realtor, Taylor, to sell the place out from under Weston, as well as his slacker son, Wesley, and his precociously termagant daughter, Emma, on whose school project Wesley maliciously urinates.

From homes to 'properties'

Unbeknownst to these three, Weston has already sold the farmstead to the local bar owner, Ellis, to settle some pressing debts. Everyone actually wants to leave home except Wesley, the disinherited son, who moodily insists on staying put and starts framing a new door.

Ellis comes by to size up his new property, and Taylor, a front man for real estate interests, warns everyone else off. Weston's humble acres are, it seems, the key to everyone's dreams but his own, or perhaps simply the world's last freehold. In any case, this won't be a home any more: There are no more homes, only properties, and no more owners, only "interests."

Weston is thus the last victim of the American dream. But far from imagining himself as such, he gleefully connives at his own ruin, as if he were indestructible and his patrimony inexhaustible. This is the man of endless second chances, burning his way through a continent that never meets a shore, the lineal descendant of James Tyrone and Willy Loman but stripped of their humanity and pathos.

In short, Weston is a symbol, which onstage is a very risky thing to be. At first, Shepard is able to suggest a mythic dimension to Weston, but he is finally an antihero; and as he will have nowhere to go in the end, so too will the play built around him.

Painted into a corner

After Weston's majestically drunk, barn-burning entrance, we find him in Act II cheerfully sober, fixing breakfast and carrying on as if he hadn't a care or a creditor in the world. The fact that his house has been twice sold out from under him is a matter of sublime indifference, because no one can evict him from where he's chosen to live.

Of course, reality can't help but intrude, quite loudly in Richard Hamburger's production. Smoke and noise, though, can't disguise the fact that the play has painted itself into a corner along with its protagonist, and can only stop in freeze-frame.

Shepard's debt to Pinter

Thirty-five years after its premiere in 1977, Curse of the Starving Class seems both dated and relevant at once. Its relevance to our own Age of Foreclosure is obvious, and it lets neither buyer nor seller off the hook. The Commodification of Everything, as Immanuel Wallerstein puts it, has proceeded apace, and the 1970s seem a time of innocence and security in retrospect, although of course they were no such thing.

At the same time, what has grown apparent in Shepard himself is his indebtedness to Harold Pinter. It's Pinter with an American accent, to be sure, and American too in its sense of anarchy; but the Englishman's dour menace stands behind its nonstop aggression and exchange of insults, its relentless deconstruction of the family romance.

With Pinter, though, a sense of mystery remains— of the unspoken and incommunicable. In Shepard, little is left to the imagination, and violence has the last say.

Star of the show

Bruce McKenzie brought a manic, Bruce Dern-like energy to his Weston, and Keira Keely's Emma was the very image of balked adolescent fury. Nate Miller's Wesley had both to use a fake penis and display his real one as he morphed, ruefully but inevitably, into a dispirited version of his father.

Peter Schmitz had a good turn as the slick-tongued Taylor, and Ed Swidey was a swaggering Ellis. Lorri Holt seemed a bit adrift in the contradictions of Ella's character.

It intends no disrespect to the performers to say that Matt Saunders's set was in many ways the star of the show, a perfect visual correlative to Shepard's image of America, and as savagely wrecked in its way as the Pequod.

Some writers, such as O'Neill, find new and deeper ways to express the one thing they have to say. Shepard's vision allowed for no growth. His characters grind and clash, but very rarely do they feel, and what they wish is chiefly to escape each other.

This is the formula of cinematic Westerns, and Shepard's own "Westerns" seem a grotesque extension of the genre. His dramatic skills are formidable, and carry him a long way. But his characters merely signify; they do not persuade.

This is not to say they are insufficiently realistic. The theater is dying today of shallow realism, and the last thing it needs is more of it. We are indeed alienated from each other, frighteningly so, and it's the task of theater to describe this condition. When it has done so, however, the artist's work has only begun.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.