In All My Sons, now revived on Broadway, Arthur Miller’s America is a sunny place slowly shown to conceal a metaphorical swamp. Sam Shepard’s The Curse of the Starving Class, which premiered in London in 1977 and off-Broadway in 1978, offers an even bleaker view of the US, with a nuclear family coming apart on an already blighted landscape.
In the opening moments of Terry Kinney’s harrowing production at off-Broadway’s Signature Theater Company, Julian Crouch’s grimy kitchen set fractures to leave a chaotic nightmare of a household. Like many of the playwright’s families, the Tates are divided. Battling parents Weston and Ella are each planning to sell off the barely functioning family ranch, while their disturbed offspring Wesley and Emma cling to the property in search of their identity. Dysfunction reigns as doors are destroyed, animals are butchered, gangsters invade, and the refrigerator becomes the sole source of solace.
Just as All My Sons’s Keller family represent a morally deficient America, the Tates are stand-ins for a lost nation, not even pretending to enjoy prosperity but struggling just to make ends meet and fill that fridge.
Kinney and his electric ensemble led by a scary David Warshofsky as Weston and a wily Maggie Siff as Ella bring Shepard’s blighted clan to disturbing, pulsing life.
Lizzy Declement effectively taps into Emma’s adolescent anger and Gilles Geary is especially vital as a creepy, soulless Wesley. Like a rootless stalker, he grasps for meaning in simple tasks like building a new door and caring for a diseased lamb (a real one is onstage).
When actors are not upstaged by live animals, it shows they’re truly grounded in the material.Such is the case with this master Class in performing Sam Shepard.
