After concentrating on new work and regional premieres for its first decade, Curious Theatre opens its 11th season with a stunning, no-holds- barred production of Sam Shepard’s gritty 1978 hit, “Curse of the Starving Class.”
Given the political season, it turns out to be a savvy choice by producing artistic director Chip Walton, who pulls out all the stops while getting to direct one of his favorite playwrights for the first time.
With a big Western sky that moodily evolves with the drama, evoking a collage of highlights from the infinite palette of our sunsets and twilights, and some cowboy guitar melodies seemingly illuminated by the same, we find ourselves in the kitchen of a hardscrabble spread somewhere in the dry hills of California.
In the aftermath of his father, Weston’s, drunken bout the previous evening, son Wesley (John Jurcheck) is picking up the busted fence. The front door is gone, too. Inside, his mom, Ella (Dee Covington), tells him not to bother. Perhaps these folks migrated from Oklahoma, like the Joads in “The Grapes of Wrath;” maybe they’re related to the Westons from Pawhuska, Okla., in Tracy Lett’s “August: Osage County.”
After some surgical editing for the April, 2008, 3oth anniversary production by ACT in San Francisco, Shepard’s work sings, quickly introducing the dynamics of a wildly contrasting dysfunctional family and its struggle for survival in a vanishing frontier.
Covington seizes the moment to express Ella’s pent-up years of frustration — symbolized by the invariably empty refrigerator that everyone keeps opening to see if, by some miraculous chance, it has been stocked with something to eat — without ever letting go of hope. “We’re going to sell the place and go to Europe,” she desperately repeats, bringing to mind the Moscow over the horizon in Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”
Juricheck launches into the first in a series of family soliloquies, showing off Shepard’s gift for poetic reverie, as he describes the wonder of life’s possibilities. By the end, when we see him in his father’s discarded clothes, Juricheck has strikingly illustrated what Shepard describes as taking on our parents’ poison.
His sister, Emma (Joanna Walchuk), has somehow managed, up until this time, to stay on top of her schoolwork and shine at the 4H Club. Her coming of age is a rude awakening, thrown from puberty to sexual bargaining. Walchuk finds the through line in Emma’s romantic imagination and spunk, which conveys her, with comic aplomb, through a series of wild adventures as only Shepard could invent them.
Whenever he’s around, Weston (Michael McNeill) emotionally terrorizes his family with raging rants aimed to malign; yet McNeill’s humorous take on this blubbering fool creates room for a surprising twist.
Josh Robinson, Tom Borrillo, and David Russell spice up the plot with a smarmy lot of oddballs. Exquisite craft work from Shannon McKinney (lighting), Michael R. Duran (set), Brian Freeland (sound) and Ann Louise Piano (costumes), not to mention a live lamb and a smattering of nudity, complete the sparkling effort.
With only passing allusions to the pressures of development and “progress,” Shepard manages to find a metaphor of impressive power that delivers a stinging critique of American materialism. As Wesley says, “It’s more than losing the house — it’s losing a country.”
Bob Bows also reviews theater for Variety, for KUVO/89.3 FM, and for his own website, . He can be reached at bbows@coloradodrama.com.
“Curse of the Starving Class”
Dark satire. Presented by Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St., Denver. Written by Sam Shepard. Directed by Chip Walton. Starring John Jurcheck, Dee Covington, Joanna Walchuk, Michael McNeill. Through October 18. Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. 2 hours, 30 minutes.$18-34.. 303-623-0524, online at .
