SU Drama Department mounts a difficult assignment in Shepard’s ‘Curse of the Starving Class’

The young cast, many in their stage debuts, earns an "A" for effort –– but not execution –– in this difficult script

By David Feldman
http://cnycafemomus.com/David_Feldman.html

Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class premiered in 1978 at the New York Shakespeare Festival.  No doubt it was a stunner in its day.  But as the current SU Department of Drama reveals, the script is showing its age.  The plot (such as it is) meanders, the characters are mostly clichés, and the theme is treated in a heavy-handed manner.  More than that, the famous powerful Shepard language only emerges sporadically.  This production, though, is a good exercise for the students –– most of whom are making their main stage debuts in it.  But it’s a tough script for young performers.  

Its subject is the American Dream, or rather its failure.  

A quintessentially standard American family –– father, mother, son and daughter –– try to wrest a living off a run-down piece of land out on the far fringes of America:  contemporary California.  The father, Weston Tate (Phil Blechman, doing vigorous work but with an accent that sounds more Jersey than true West), is a drunk who wants to sell the ranch and start a new life in Mexico.  But the mother, Ella, has been convinced by a slick-talking local con man that she’s the rightful owner.  She wants to sell out so she can go to Europe and the con man can turn it into a development; meanwhile she’s carrying on an affair with him.  

The heirs to this mess are son Wesley, who also dreams of getting away, and very young teen daughter Emma, who has her dreams, too –– of winning a prize for her demonstration on how to cut up a chicken for cooking, or maybe taking the family horse and running away on her own.   She’s got other problems, too.  For one thing, Wesley urinates on her show-and-tell material, not to mention that she’s just had her first menstrual period which her mother spends a fair amount of Act I telling her and us about.  This is not a family that hides its secrets.

In a nice touch, Director Gerardine Clark has double-cast the female roles so the woman students can get their chances to perform in a major production.  Allana Rogers played a strong but somewhat shrill mother the evening I went, and Emily Robinson was a bouncy and convincingly young daughter.  They’ll alternate with Mary Ann Pianka and Elizabeth Boyke, respectively.

This is not a play that hides its secrets, either.  Shepard makes it unsubtly clear that this family has reached a dead end. Their cries of pain are the last whimpers of the American dream.  Their land, one way or another, is going to be taken over by the "Zombies" who want only to become rich off it, not produce anything worthwhile (not even the avocados which seem to be the only thing that grows there –– not counting anger and frustration, that is –– and which father Wesley brings home one day to feed a family that is starving not so much for food as for something significant to live for).  

Lest we miss the point, consider the last lines of the play in which son Wesley and mother Ella have a vision of where this will all end.  The eagle is both the American dream and the father, now sobered up and the only one who decides to stay and keep the ranch going.  The tomcat represents all those advertising people and lawyers and real estate developers and corporate types who only want to make money off it:

WESLEY:  And that eagle comes down and picks up the cat in his talons and carries him screaming off into the sky.

ELLA:  That’s right.  And they fight.  They fight like crazy in the middle of the sky.  The cat’s tearing his chest out, and the eagle’s trying to drop him, but the cat won’t let go because he knows if he falls he’ll die.

WESLEY:  And the eagle’s being torn apart in midair  . . .  trying to free himself from the cat, and the cat won’t let him go.

ELLA:  And they come crashing down to earth.  Both of them come crashing down.  Like one whole thing.

Not very subtle, any of that, and not Shepard at his best.  And certainly not very easy for inexperienced performers to pull off.  

One delightful star of this production is a real live lamb who bleats loudly and comically to us and to the cast, which plays off it without missing a beat in a professionally impromptu fashion.  There are other comical bits and some moments of strength here but things tend to move rather slowly in the production, while Shepard begs for action to go in double-time.  But you’ve got to give the cast an "A" for effort, if not for execution, in even taking on this difficult script.  David Siciliano does convincing work as the slimy lawyer.  So does Will Pullen as the son.  Corey Steiner and Peter Sansbury are comically menacing as two small-time thugs.  

Also very nice are Katie Strube’s oddball costumes and the sound design by Kate Foretek.   I especially liked her starting it all off with a curtain raiser recording of Perry Como singing Catch a Falling Star.  That nicely sets in the right period and adds an ironic touch.  The star of the Tate family has fallen, and who will be there to catch it except for those most mendacious of Americans, the ones who would destroy the Tate’s dream in the name of "progress" and the almighty dollar? 

DETAILS BOX:
What: Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Shepard
Where: Storch Theatre at Syracuse Stage, 820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse
When: Through April 10
Length of performance: Two hours and 45 minutes, including two intermissions
Tickets:  $8, rush one hour before curtain; $16, students and seniors; $18, general admission. (April 6:  "pay what you can night" with student ID.)  Call 315-443-3275, or http://vpa.syr.edu/drama
Family guide: Strong language, adult themes and action, nudity