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Curse of the Starving Class Off-Broadway Reviews

Sam Shepard’s fiercely funny, OBIE award-winning play returns to the stage. With their family home on the verge of collapse and the creditors closing in, ... (more info). See what all the critics had to say and see all the ratings for Curse of the Starving Class including the New York Times and more...

Theatre: The Pershing Square Signature Center [The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre], 480 West 42nd Street
CRITICS RATING:
5.86
READERS RATING:
None Yet

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Critics' Reviews

4

Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class’ Doesn’t Satisfy

From: The New York Times | By: Maya Phillips | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

8

Christian Slater Is Destroying the Stage on Broadway

From: The Daily Beast | By: Tim Teeman | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

6

This Curse of the Starving Class Doesn’t Have Much in Its Fridge

From: Vulture | By: Jackson McHenry | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

5

Curse of the Starving Class: Curses! The Sam Shepard Classic Declassifies Itself

From: New York Stage Review | By: David Finkle | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

5

Curse of the Starving Class: A Sam Shepard Walk on the Tepid Side

From: New York Stage Review | By: Frank Scheck | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

7

'Curse of the Starving Class' review — Sam Shepard drama cuts to the core of Americana

From: New York Theatre Guide | By: Amelia Merrill | Date: 2/25/2025

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.

6

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS Is As Timely As Ever — Review

From: Theatrely | By: Joey Sims | Date: 2/25/2025

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.


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