Another Winner at A.C.T.

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS

By

Sam Shepard

at A.C.T. through May 25^th

This is the second time I have seen this amazing play about intellectual and social starvation in America’s middle class and it is as infuriating, as earth shaking and as true this time as last. “It’s particularly uncanny that we’re presenting this play about the wild underbelly of the American dream of home ownership while the homes of half of America are being foreclosed,” said ACT’s Artistic Director Carey Perloff. “It goes to show that, in the theater, you never know what black swan is creeping up on you to give new life and meaning to the work you’re doing.”

To me, this play is about anger: anger at the unfairness of life, anger at the cruel tricks fate plays on our best intended decisions and anger at the immense hardship life hurls at us when we least expect it. It is about our cruelty to those we are supposed to love and the greed that motivates the best of us and the worst. It takes a strong, exceptional cast to bring this production to life and a director who understands where this plot is trying to take us against our will. “This play is grounded in the story of Sam’s dad coming home from World War II, says Director Peter DuBois. “As part of an entire generation of alcoholic men rendered completely numb by the trauma of the war. This influx gave way to a simmering tension arising from this mass of men who were generally broken by hard experience.”

The moment the house lights dim, these magnificent actors rivet you to the action on stage. Ella (Pamela Reed) an angry, frustrated, furious wife and ineffective mother looks at her daughter Emma (Nicole Lowrance) ands says “Why couldn’t there be something, sometimes?” because her life is nothing: nothing happening, nothing resolved and nothing anywhere to feed her, not food, not comfort, not love, not satisfaction. She tells her daughter of her plan to sell the house and move somewhere else…anywhere else…maybe Europe and Emma asks why. “We’d still be the same people,” she says and she is right. They are all human beings beaten into angry wads of destroyed hopes who want the world to reward them for something they have not done.

Pamela Reed was in the ACT’s 1978 production of this play as Emma. “What Shepard is talking about, the sale of America and the loss of the family and the breaking down of what makes us a family, is more profound today than it was when we first did it,” she says. “People are more aware of it now. He was a visionary in many ways. Unfortunately what he’s talking about has become so true.”

Reality is on that stage but it is too shocking and difficult to digest without the bizarre situations Shepard uses to illustrate his point: Emma coved with mud because she took her horse into town and the horse bolted, Wesley (Jud Williford) who defiles his sister’s 4-H poster, and Weston, the disillusioned, drunk patriarch asleep on the table swearing his fury at life and a callused world with every breath he is forced to take. Nothing will ever satisfy him. It cannot. “Nothing surprises me anymore,” says Ella as she watches everything in her kitchen, in her life, and even her future disintegrate around her. “Nobody looks like what they are.”

This is an ensemble piece. Every character is important and every actor is right on the mark. There is not one false note in the action on stage horrifyingly funny , devastatingly valid and horrible scenarios played out before us. “Everybody at the end of this play is so different from where they started,” says Reed. “It’s everybody’s story. There are no frivolous parts of this play.”
When I first saw Curse of the Starving Class, my companion said, “What kind of a mind could conjure up something as shocking as this?” My answer is that the man who created this dialogue was a prophet, a human being who saw beyond our rationalizations and our politically correct behavior into what we really are and how we want to treat one another when no one we fear is looking. “I find it a huge dilemma,” said Shepard. “The friction between who we instinctively feel ourselves to be and anything that’s influencing us to become something quite different.”

The result is a theatrical masterpiece that isn’t pretty and isn’t sweet. Instead it is real…so real your flesh will crawl with the memory for months, even years after you leave the theater.

IF YOU GO:

Curse of the Starving Class continues through May 25, Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 pm; matinees Wednesday, Saturday and Sundays at 2 pm

WHERE: The American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary Street

San Francisco, CA 94108

TICKETS:

www.act-sf.org

415 749 2228