Review Roundup: CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS At The New Group

Reviews are in for Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class at The New Group, starring  David Anzuelo, Kyle Beltran, Calista Flockhart, Cooper Hoffman, Jeb Kreager, Stella Marcus and Christian Slater, directed by Scott Elliott, running now through April 6.

Sam Shepard’s fiercely funny, OBIE award-winning play Curse of the Starving Class returns to the stage.  With their family home on the verge of collapse and the creditors closing in, the Tate family white-knuckles to their past, while scratching and clawing their way towards a better future.  This timeless story dismantles the American dream in its look at a family fighting to stay alive.

Maya Phillips, The New York Times: Scott Elliott’s direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard’s work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. ... These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard’s script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances.

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: The intensity of Shepard’s writing—which segues dazzlingly from brutal to whimsical to extravagantly operatic—is matched in director Scott Elliott’s impressive staging in one of Signature’s smallest spaces. You feel as if you’re being held hostage by what unfolds before you in this theater; the harm and dysfunction afflicting and being dished out by the Tates is the most vicious of vicious cycles, and dangerously, physically close, accentuating our discomfort.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: In this production, Jeff Croiter’s lighting focuses a spotlight on each actor as they get their big moment. Elliot may have been aiming for a feeling of immediacy with that choice, but double-underlining those speeches makes them each feel like more of an exercise. This may be a recurring problem with revivals of Shepard, as my colleague Sara Holdren noted with the last Curse go-round. Actors might love the cachet of trying to bull-ride a canonical work, but they’re not prepared for just how difficult a play like this is.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: At some moment in this last segment, Emma declares she’s waiting for something to happen (thereby speaking for the audience, too). Playwright Shepard—who’s already called for a live sheep (the attentive Lois) as well as nudity—provides such an outburst (special thanks to sound designer Leah Gelpe, lighting designer Jeff Croiter), but it feels too busily contrived, as does a stretched-out closing parable.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: What it mainly provides is the opportunity to see such film and television stars as Calista Flockhart, Christian Slater, and Cooper Hoffman in the flesh. Unfortunately, they’re all upstaged by Lois, an adorable sheep whose program bio informs us that she appears annually in the Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas show.

Amelia Merrill, New York Theatre Guide: It takes a long time for Cooper Hoffman’s Wesley to admit he is starving. While his sister Emma (newcomer Stella Marcus, who masterfully handles Shepard’s style) is eager for the rest of her family to wake up to reality, their parents insist in front of an empty refrigerator that they are not poor.

Joey Sims, Theatrely: To breathe theatrical life into this wild clan—and Shepard’s scorching dialogue—demands a degree of intensity that Scott Elliot’s production just can’t provide.

Average Rating: 58.6%