Review: Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart Fight With a Refrigerator in Curse of the Starving Class

Curse of the Starving Class ranks high among Sam Shepard’s best-known plays, up there with True West and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child. It gets revived often enough; it’s last major New York run was a Signature Theatre production back in 2019. Now the New Group has returned the play to the Pershing Square Signature Center with direction by Scott Elliott and a starry cast led by Calista Flockhart and Christian Slater.

Strange to say, I don’t remember much about that 2019 production other than a nifty special effect involving a surprisingly spacious set that seemed at odds with the claustrophobic lives of Shepard’s Tate family. That’s not to say I don’t think Curse of the Starving Class deserves its place among great 20th-century American plays (it was first produced in 1977). But this new production has me wondering what I’ll remember about it a few years from now.

The Tates are a lower-middle-class American family scraping by in California’s Central Valley. They live in a rundown house on a struggling farm maintained by Wesley (Cooper Hoffman, Philip Seymour’s son), the ravenous scion of frazzled housewife Ella (Calista Flockhart) and abusive alcoholic Weston (Christian Slater). Wesley’s sister, Emma (Stella Marcus), has dreams of bolting from their home with its perpetually empty refrigerator and a brother who pees on her 4H projects. Ella, on the other hand, wants to sell the house and move to Europe. “They have everything in Europe,” she says. “They know where they came from.”

Ella does, in fact, have plans to sell the house—without her husband’s OK—and she enlists the help of shady real-estate lawyer Taylor (Kyle Beltran). Little does she know that Weston, in a drunken stupor, has already sold the house to Ellis (Jeb Kreager) for a paltry sum so that he can pay off thugs Slater (David Anzuelo) and Emerson (Kreager). As you might expect from all the lies, double-dealing, and booze, it doesn’t end well for the Tates as they watch their meagre dreams fall apart.

Elliott has done a good job capturing the squalor of the Tate home. It doesn’t just look dirty, it looks like a bomb has gone off, with shattered glass everywhere and crooked venetian blinds hanging in the window (detailed set by Arnulfo Maldonado with provocative props by Jackson Berkley). And Flockhart enters as though she has just crossed the Mojave on foot, hair rollers dangling from wispy locks that have given up all hope of ever holding a curl. We feel as though we’ve entered the home of the American nightmare.

The production has other moments that will be hard to forget. There’s the live sheep (played by Lois and trained by LTD Animals) that gets most of the show’s laughs (at the performance I attended, Lois had a hilarious sneezing fit that made Slater’s monologue impossible to follow). Then there are intense moments when each of the main characters breaks the fourth wall and delivers a speech to the audience as though they’re modern-day prophets (Jeff Croiter eerily spotlights the actors’ faces during these scenes to ominous effect). Beltran wins the prize for best creep-out as he stares at us and intones, “The only thing you can do is cooperate. To play ball, to become part of us. … Because if you don’t, you’ll all be left behind. Every last one of you.” In our times, the speech feels a little too real.

Less effective is Elliott’s pacing of the first act, which draws out the dialogue into longueurs, and Croiter’s murky lighting doesn’t help matters. Even when everyone is repeatedly slamming the refrigerator door, the performances in the first half lack gusto. Slater sometimes seems a bit bored with his role, and Flockhart, though well cast, never really embodies Ella’s angry fatigue. More successful is Hoffman as he hurls artichokes and stomps across the stage naked to retrieve Lois from her pen. It’s not until the second act, when all hell breaks loose (Leah Golpe’s explosive sound design rouses anyone who may have drifted off), that the cast looks like they’re all on the same page.

But that may be an issue with the play itself. Despite timely moments, Curse of the Starving Class has begun to show its age. There’s a quaintness about the sheep, the nudity, the urinating onstage—once wonderfully shocking, now not so much. Shepard’s neo-absurdist realism will always fascinate me. But I’ve begun to think that this play might require meatier direction to keep the audience from leaving hungry.