Word: sheparded
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...FREQUENT BEST, playwright Sam Shepard uses grisly explorations of family frictions and anxieties to roil up the audience in the way every good dramatist should. The Curse of the Starving Class, the last of a stark family-history trilogy, abounds in this desired therapeutic grittiness. Its characters' unpleasantness produce just the kind of irksome self-questioning and squirming that Aristotle prescribed 1500 years ago, the kind that makes going to the theater more than just entertainment. In Curse, only occasionally do Shepard, and the generally able troupe presenting it at the Loeb, stumble out of the realm of theatrical effectiveness...
From the first view of a rundown kitchen, complete with refrigerator and green plastic chairs, director R.J. Cutler and set designer Peter Sorger demonstrate a firm grasp of Shepard's hard realism. The Tates, a family of four, scrap endlessly about their unproductive farmstead and their dreary lives. Weston (Dean Norris), the alcoholic father, has just bashed in the front door after a night in the bars. His wife Ella (Nina Bernstein), who called the police to get rid of him, is having an affair with a slick town lawyer, and both husband and wife would like nothing more than...
That squalor, the play's major motive force, makes the production worth squirming for. Shepard's tools for inducing that Squirm aren't much subtler than the "starving class" metaphor of the title, which, despite numerous references in the dialogue, never surpasses the self-conscious (they're emotionally starving, you see). Emma (Molly White) the younger of the two gawky adolescents, is having her first period, as the mother constantly reminds father and brother to excuse her behavior. Wesley (Steven Gutwillig), her brother, urinates on a heap of Emma's painstakingly drawn posters. Shepard isn't one for the soft...
THAT REACTION comes through loud and clear, helped by some strong actors and a director who sticks cautiously to a few basic note--squalor, loneliness, weired twistings of communication, and a creeping, gradually dominating mistrust. Cutler lets the cast carry Shepard's heavy messages, but he doesn't add much dramatic shape or thrust. Too ofen, the dialogue sags unbearably under the weight of its pregnant pauses; at other times, mostly in Act One, the actors lose track of their speeches meaning and say everything with the same flat air of significance...
...Alan Shepard, 59, the first American in space, emerged as a shrewd entrepreneur after leaving NASA in 1974. Based in Houston, he has developed extensive real estate projects and is a wholesale distributor for Coors beer in southern Texas. Remembered for hitting a golf ball on the moon as commander of Apollo 14 in 1971, he relishes playing in celebrity golf tournaments and, like others of the Mercury group, is a grandfather several times over...