'Curse of the Starving Class' at the Wilma (1st review)

The dysfunctional family is a familiar staple in modern American theater, but the physically battered, utterly atomized rural California household in Sam Shepard's allegorical Curse of the Starving Class brings new meaning to the term.

Weston, the father (Bruce McKenzie in the Wilma production), is perpetually drunk, violent, missing, deeply in debt or all four; when the play opens, he's sleeping off a hangover after punctuating his return from a long absence by kicking in the house's front door. Weston and his wife, Ella (Lorri Holt), barely communicate. She is conniving to sell their property and skip off with the proceeds, unaware that Weston is conniving to do the very same thing.

Weston (his name is no accident) and Ella are plagued by violent loan sharks and sleazy land speculators. More to the point, they're plagued by their own addictions to debt and real estate. When one character declares, "If you don't invest in the future of this great land, we'll all be left behind," neither of them wonders: Behind what, or whom? They and their adolescent children speak constantly of leaving home but seem unable to do so.

Their teenagers Wesley and Emma, as their names suggest, are doomed to repeat their parents' destructive pathologies. Wesley (Nate Miller) urinates on his pubescent sister's 4-H project— on the kitchen floor, no less. Emma (Keira Keeley), for her part, vents her anger by commandeering the family horse and shotgun and galloping along the freeway into town, where she rides into a tavern and shoots up the place.

Sleeping in the kitchen

In the Wilma Theater's set design by Matt Saunders, the surrounding desert and hills seem to encroach upon the family's equally dysfunctional kitchen, and vice versa. The family gravitates to the kitchen for just about everything but its intended purpose. Wesley brings a live baby lamb into the kitchen for tending. Weston dumps his laundry here. Like their pioneer ancestors who slept outdoors on the ground, Weston and Ella sleep more soundly on the kitchen table than in their own beds. The refrigerator is perpetually empty or nearly so, its shelves dependent on whatever food some hunter-gatherer might randomly deposit there from one day to the next.

A contemporary urban theater audience— especially an audience of Easterners unmarinated in the psychological ramifications of the closing of America's Western frontier— may well wonder: "What's wrong with these people? With whom am I supposed to empathize?" The answers, respectively, are: everything and everyone. The Wilma's deft revival of Shepard's 1977 work strikes me as a profound metaphor for the unintended consequences of the opening of the American West, more than a century after Americans ran out of West to open.

The accursed family members in Curse, after all, are not your customary blacks ground down by racism or Jews haunted by the Holocaust. Nor are they an O'Neill clan of Irish intellectuals afflicted by drink or a gay household driven mad by homophobia. This family's problems stem not from what has been done to them but from what their forebears have done to others, and to their environment.

America's desert, transformed

Specifically, these are the descendants of the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish who fled the overpopulated British Isles for America's Eastern seaboard in the 17th and 18th Centuries and then just kept heading west whenever farmland turned barren or pickings turned slim or towns grew too crowded— first across the Alleghenies to the Mississippi River Basin after the American Revolution and then across the Rockies to California during and after the Gold Rush of 1849.

To white Americans who survived that experience— no easy achievement in itself— the "opening" of the American West was one of the marvels of world history. Before the California Gold Rush, the vast expanse between the Missouri River and the Rockies was routinely designated on maps as the "Great American Desert." Yet in 1916 an 82-year-old retired Montana cattle rancher named Granville Stuart reflected with wonder on all that had changed:

"Now I see fields of alfalfa and waving grain where were once the bunch grass and the wild sage," Stuart wrote in his memoir. "Electric trains travel smoothly along o'er what once were trails, and tunnel through mountains over which I have climbed with much difficulty. Automobiles spin along on splendid highways which but a few short years ago were my hunting trails, difficult to travel even on my sure-footed Indian pony. Where I was wont to cross streams on hastily constructed rafts I now see splendid bridges of steel and concrete. The places where I pitched my tent for a few days' hunt or a prospecting trip are now the sites of thriving cities and villages illuminated by electric light."

Nine men for every woman

Such a heroic transformation occurred only because thousands of men (as well as some women) pushed the limits of human achievement and endurance. But the cost of this miracle was staggering, not only in terms of lives lost but of lives destroyed— emotionally, financially or psychologically.

The frontier before the Civil War was a macho place where men outnumbered women by more than nine to one. Thus the combustible prime ingredients of frontier life were boredom, guns, liquor and an excess of boisterous young single males unrestrained by law enforcement or religion or the domesticating influence of women.

This mix was exacerbated by the particular ethnic characteristics of the Brits who settled the West— the "Scots-Irish barbarian inheritance" that Weston alludes to in Curse. If I may be permitted a broad generalization, these Brits were characterized above all by ambition, aggressiveness, individualism, land hunger and bigotry.

In practice this meant that the typical Brit sought to acquire as much land for himself as possible and live on it far from everyone else, and he related to Native Americans only as obstacles to be pushed out of his way when necessary. Although the Brits could have solved their gender imbalance problem by intermarrying with Native Americans— who, due to deaths in inter-tribal wars, suffered from a shortage of men— that prospect was anathema to their class-conscious psyches.

By contrast, a smaller group of frontier settlers— the French and French-Canadians— were complacent, peaceful, social, communal and racially tolerant. The French owned their land communally, clustered their homes close together so they could converse with each other through their windows, and routinely lived among and married Native Americans. It's tempting to suggest that if the West had been predominantly settled by the French instead of the Brits, America's whole Native American tragedy might have been avoided. But on the other hand, the West might still be a desert.

Paying for the past

Well, what happens when a group of people who have spent centuries successfully utilizing such tools as ambition, individualism and violence to sweep across the Western Hemisphere finally find themselves hemmed in by an exploding population, just like their ancestors in Britain three or four centuries ago?

"This is where the line ended," Weston laments. "Right up to the Pacific Ocean." He speaks of heading for Mexico— "That's where everyone escapes to"— and Ella speaks equally vaguely of fleeing to Europe. But fleeing— especially to the south or east— isn't a viable option for people whose genetic impulses have always pushed them west.

Like his ancestors, Weston has spent his life borrowing against his future hopes— the hope of a gold strike or a lucrative trading post location or, if things didn't work out, a fresh plot of land somewhere else. That formula served his ancestors well for a long time.

But now there's no place left to move; the day of reckoning has arrived. To survive, Weston and his family must pay for their past (and for the past of their ancestors) and learn to live with their neighbors (as well as each other).

As that East Coast sage Teddy Roosevelt put it, they must do what they can, with what they have, where they are. That task involves rejecting their entire heritage. Such a project, Shepard implies, may prove almost as formidable as the opening of the West itself.♦


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