Word: shepards
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...Cause th' decadence n' entropy in Shepard's West are as inevitable as passin' out after you drink eight Pabst Blue Ribbons in 15 minutes. Part of th' reason is that th' characters are all so damn self-destructive. Curse is about a family whose members have what one of them describes as "poison" in th' blood. They're alcoholic, they're violent, they're venal, they're ornery...
Worst of all, they fantasize too much. Ever th' pioneers, Shepard's characters always dream of movin' on t' somewhere else, like Mexico, Alaska or even Europe (ironic, huh?), as if movin' would make them into different people who maybe weren't so self-destructive. Th' members of th' family also dream that things would be better if they either sold their fallow avocado ranch or if they fixed it up. It doesn't hit 'em til th' end that their fantasies are impossible, that they're doomed...
...Wesley (Daniel O'Keefe), mother Ella (Holly Cate) n' daughter Emma (Ellen Bledsoe). Weston is the drunken, violent father whose debts n' poor judgment are th' reason th' family is up shit creek t' begin with. Wesley is an arrogant chip off th' ol' blockhead, another one of those Shepard man-children who wears flannel shirts n' still has strings of model airplanes hangin' from th' ceiling in his room...
...doesn't realize that she, too, is doomed 'cause she carries Dad's "poison" in her veins. Ella, of course, doesn't carry it, but she makes up for it by bein' self-righteously angry at th' rest of her brood. This is th' archetypal Western family, says Shepard; th' Cleavers or th' Huxtables they...
...didn't catch any weak spots. But th' actin' don't seem t' matter too much anyways in a play where everyone is an archetype n' th' outcome is pretty much a foregone conclusion. Since everythin' is so inevitable, Curse of the Starving Class seems, like some other Shepard plays, t' be about one act too long. But Shepard's benighted poets have a certain eloquence, n' it's worth seein' the show just t' hear some of th' crazy things they...