Sam Shepard was at the height of his powers when he wrote Curse of the Starving Class, in 1977; it’s the first of his dysfunctional family plays of that era: Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and his masterpiece A Lie of the Mind. However—at least in Scott Elliott’s new staging—Curse is cursed by diminishing dramatic returns and fraught symbolism that turns crushingly literal.

 

The play revolves around the Tate family living on a desolate farm in rural California—father Weston, a drunkard, is barely home, while his wife Ella is busy planning a new life by befriending a shady real estate agent-banker Taylor with the hopes he will buy the property. Their children are Wesley, their 20ish son who fluctuates between anger and sympathy toward his erstwhile parents, and teenage Emma, who has designs on leaving for good.

 

For nearly three hours, these people battle one another psychologically and physically as their relationships ebb and flow. Weston—who scared Ella so much the night before the play begins that she called the cops on him after one of his drunken rages ended with him destroying the kitchen door and window—threatens both Ella and Taylor, whom he takes to be her paramour, and who probably suckered him into buying worthless desert property. Meanwhile, the owner of the local bar Weston frequents shows up one day with a lawful deed for the family farm that Weston agreed to sell to while on a bender.

 

Shepard is a master of poetic dialogue that reveals his damaged characters’ buried secrets, and some of that survives in Curse, but the pregnant monologues by each family member have been staged by Elliott as Shakespearean soliloquies aimed at the audience, blunting their casual immediacy. Elliott also has encouraged the actors to remain in one gear throughout, which Christian Slater (Weston) and Calista Flockhart (Ella) mostly cling to, while Cooper Hoffman (Wesley) and Stella Marcus (Emma) break free occasionally, to their—and the play’s—benefit.

 

Even the handling of the family sheep, one of Shepard’s most potent metaphors, is inadequate. In the script, the sheep is sick with maggots, and Wesley brings it inside to nurse it, much to his mother’s chagrin.  But in this production, the sheep, played by Lois (sometimes Gladys), looks quite healthy—so much that the animal steals the scene when Weston is telling an anecdote. When the audience giggles over the sheep’s natural reaction to Slater speaking to it, it throws everyone out of the drama. Which might be a good thing, for—despite Jeff Croiter’s canny lighting and Leah Gelpe’s sharp sound design (too bad Arnulfo Maldonado’s kitchen set is less run down than it should be)—Elliott’s staging is too unbalanced to forcefully embody Shepard’s fractured family.