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Curse of the Starving Class
The kitchen is the heart of the home, and nowhere is that truism more true than in Shepard’s family tragedies. In this 1977 entry in that catalog (which also includes Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind), typical Shepard keystones and symbolism are brutally and comically enacted in that room. Down-at-the-heels characters struggle on their barren Western land to achieve a glorified manifest destiny they cannot fulfill. In Curse, the misery and misfortune of Weston and Ella Tate and grown children Emma and Wesley are funneled through the banal presence of a constantly checked, mostly empty refrigerator. “All it’s good for is slamming,” bawls a drunken Weston at the end of a colossal bender.
As outside elements threaten their crumbling world—a sleazy bar owner and slick lawyer vie for their tired property—the play totters just slightly off its grim path, but New Leaf, continuing its string of solid enactments of challenging plays, still navigates a powerful, cogent production. Lewandowski and the robust cast deliver some of the play’s more theatrical moments a bit too forcefully, but all elements, especially Nick Keenan’s subtle and affecting sound design, support the family’s descent into ruin. And the leads bring it home: Victoria Gilbert’s feminine and bitter Ella is darkly entertaining, and a formidable John Gray shrewdly modulates the long windup and devastating pitch of Weston’s alcoholic rage and the calm after that storm, drawing us into the unyielding confines of their curse.
