When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in “Curse of the Starving Class” — it’s with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak.
The Tates’ fridge is almost always empty, and there’s a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group’s lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play.
“Curse of the Starving Class,” which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.)
But the cause wasn’t a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze “like some rank old animal” and breaking the door. Though Weston’s tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they’re part of the starving class, or if it even exists.
The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all.
Like Shepard’s “Buried Child” and “True West,” “Curse of the Starving Class” is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical.
Scott Elliott’s direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard’s work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. Emma rhapsodizes about her imagined future life in Mexico as a car mechanic; Wesley recreates the sounds and feelings of the evening Weston came drunkenly crashing into the house. Even the land developer has a speech about the powers and ambitions of corporate America.
Instead of incorporating these moments into the play’s more straightforward goings-on, Elliott further heightens them by setting a prominent spotlight (lighting by Jeff Croiter) on the character, who delivers these lines not to the rest of the cast but to the audience. These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard’s script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances.
When the typically passive Ella erupts into an expletive-driven rage later in the show, Weston calmly critiques her inflection of the words, saying: “Something doesn’t ring true about it. Something deep in the voice. At the heart of things.” That could easily apply to the acting as well, which lacks intimacy and urgency. Flockhart’s Ella and Hoffman’s Wesley aren’t just impassive; they’re a little dull. Slater does the best work with his take on Weston, whose violent outbursts and wild, lurching movements provide the production with some spark.
That’s not including Lois, the 4-year-old California Red sheep who nearly steals the show as an animal who belongs to the Tate family and is afflicted with something nasty. Truly, some of Lois’s bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart. (Lois is a professional, who was also a featured performer in the living Nativity section of the “Radio City Christmas Spectacular.”) I’m being facetious, but only a little bit — some of the funniest moments on the night I saw the show were unintentional, when a vegetable went flying into an audience member’s open hand, or when Lois interrupted a tense argument with a few loud, enthusiastic “baas” toward the audience.
It’s telling if a production’s gravitas and humor comes mostly from its livestock, especially if it’s a staging of a Sam Shepard play. “Curse of the Starving Class” is a work that intentionally leaves its characters bereft, but shouldn’t do the same for its audience.
Curse of the Starving Class
Through April 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
