Theatre in Review: Curse of the Starving Class (The New Group at Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Christian Slater. Photo: Monique Carboni

In a play called Curse of the Starving Class, someone would display some hunger, no? Sadly, it's the critical element missing from Scott Elliott's production of Sam Shepard's bleak, black comedy. Shepard's characters are driven by ravenous needs -- for money, success, recognition, and revenge; more to the point, they're constantly hankering after food, which stands in for all their gnawing, unfulfilled appetites. Each spends considerable time staring into the refrigerator, wondering why nothing can fill them up. As if anything could.

After food comes real estate: As Scarlett O'Hara's father once noted, land's the only thing that lasts, and there's nothing to which this loveless, feckless gang won't stoop in their battle over the ramshackle structure that (barely) houses them and the attached farmland that seemingly yields nothing of value. Writing Curse of the Starving Class in 1978, Shepard carved out a savage slice of disenfranchised America that now seems eerily prescient. His characters are their own worst enemies, and their greed makes them ripe for the plucking.

Some of this can only be intuited in the current revival, which, oddly, domesticates this wild bunch, smoothing the script's serrated edges and reframing it as a standard entry in the American theatre's bulging folio of dysfunctional family dramas. The decision to revive Curse of the Starving Class this season is notably strange because a 2019 revival (ironically at Signature Theatre), directed by Terry Kinney, was a harrowing, hellacious good time. Eliott has assembled a starry cast, but each of his choices is slightly off; these people are malicious, feckless losers, living at the terminus of the American dream of endless growth and prosperity. Cornered, they turn on each other like a tribe of feral children. In the current production, even when committing egregious acts, everyone seems determined to mind their manners.

Calista Flockhart, clad in a tight silk wrap, rollers clinging to the bottom of her hair like shipwreck survivors, makes a solid first impression as Ella, the disenchanted matriarch who plans to sell the place behind her husband's back and escape to Europe with her two children. Ella is no candidate for Mother of the Year, and Flockhart earns some jittery laughs when handing out bizarre advice about menstruation to her daughter Emma. (Among other things, she warns against the consequences of purchasing sanitary napkins in gas stations. "You don't know whose quarters go into those machines," she says, darkly. "Those quarters carry germs.") She also invests her fiscal plans with a malicious glee, aimed directly at her husband Weston, whom she hopes to destroy. Still, Flockhart has been cast too far against type. She seems too patrician for this tumbledown existence, living among shattered glass doors and a termite infestation, with a maggot-ridden sheep occupying her kitchen; watching her, I began to wonder, idly, which Seven Sisters college she might have attended.

In Shepard's view, Ella is tied by bonds of disappointment and fury to the boozing, violent Weston. A practiced carouser with a mean streak -- the evening before the play begins, he has kicked out the glass in the kitchen's sliding doors -- he is in debt to some bad people, who are coming after him if he can't raise the money fast. Still, he clings, Gollum-like to the arid patch of ground -- "my desert land" -- located far off the grid, which, he is certain, will make his fortune. Weston is vicious, a bully for the sport of it, and when called upon to fly into a rage, throwing kitchen utensils with abandon, Christian Slater spins through the room like a tornado. What's missing is the consistent truculent undertone that makes the character so menacing. A showdown at the kitchen island between Weston and his son Wesley is surprisingly flat; you don't feel the older man pushing his son's buttons, looking for yet another reason to slap him down. (Also, Slater doesn't get at the tremendous self-pity lurking in Weston's World War II memories; scratch a bully and you'll find a snowflake.) Then again, Cooper Hoffman, so charming in the 2021 film Licorice Pizza seems in over his head here. In many ways, Wesley is the wildest member of the family, bouncing from aggression to terror, depending on who he is confronting; he is also given to random actors of violence, for no particular reason urinating on Emma's 4H project, and, later, committing a bloody act that helps to precipitate the play's climax. But Hoffman's performance is flat and, at times, almost disengaged, apparently struggling to maintain a consistent characterization over the play's nearly three-hour running time. He may need more stage experience before taking on such a demanding role.

Much better are Stella Marcus full of needling, adolescent attitude as Emma, and Kyle Beltran, looking slick in his perma-press suit as the real estate agent surreptitiously playing Ella and Weston against each other, coolly planning to pocket a profit no matter who wins. But, even with a stage filled with talented boldfaced names, watch out for animals: That sheep consistently upstages the rest of the cast with a series of reactions that, at my performance, had the audience tittering and sighing in sympathy.

With its cheap appointments and unfinished side walls, Arnulfo Maldonado's set is suitably cruddy. Jeff Croiter's lighting provides colorful time-of-day looks plus an infernal red wash during the play's climax. Catherine Zuber's costumes remind one that she can do solid, unspectacular, character-driven work in addition to fabulous fashion parades from various eras. Leah Gelpe's sound design includes some well-chosen musical selections ("Deed I Do" by Chet Atkins and Les Paul, "Here You Come Again" by Dolly Parton) with an explosion so roof-rattling it probably alarms the apartment-dwellers above the Pershing Square Signature Theatre. She also beefs up the sound of the refrigerator door closing, putting one in mind of a coffin being sealed.

Because the actors are intelligent and know their stuff, the play occasionally crackles into life, only to subside again into strangely calm waters. Coming so soon after Kinney's staging, it's difficult to divine what Elliott saw in this material and why it needed to be seen again so quickly. One never feels the rage of bottom feeders, who, denied the basic fulfillment that, they have been told, is their birthright, are grasping at anything they can get. With its marquee names, the company should have little trouble filling the theatre for the production's limited run. But it's a strange production; The New Group is usually riskier than this. --David Barbour