STAGE REVIEW : SHEPARD’S ‘CURSE’ PUTS A FAMILY IN DISARRAY

Roughly a decade after it was written, “Curse of the Starving Class” remains an extraordinary Sam Shepard play.

By now, it qualifies as early Shepard--the American family tragicomedy with a familiar twist, usually of the neck--in which everyone has been emotionally mutilated in some way, everyone wants to jump ship and nobody can.

Like most early plays it has its problems--acts that stop instead of end, some overly poetic speeches and one or two fairly raw attempts at shocking the audience. (These shall not be disclosed, but be warned that there is some nudity and other strong imagery.)

Yet in spite of those, “Curse” is legitimate throat-burning stuff, right out of the Shepard backyard still--something the production now at the Tiffany Theatre almost manages to convey. It revives our awareness of Shepard’s spooked, ongoing obsessions, but never lets us down them for ourselves.

The portrait as painted is that of a family in smithereens--a drunken father, Weston (Andrew Robinson), who has allowed the family and the homestead to go to hell; a mother, Ella (Carrie Snodgress), who can’t cope and formulates airy plans for fleeing to Europe; a resolute 15-year-old daughter, Emma (Suzanne Calvert), who’s going to get on her horse, head for the freeway and open a garage in Baja; a slightly older, more anguished son, Wesley (Brad Whitford), who’s trying to keep it together but can’t find the sustenance on which to do it--either in the empty refrigerator that he keeps staring into or in the surrounding bleakness, physical and moral.

Each parent has a plan to sell this piece of decaying property without telling the other, though each manages to tell the kids, which only deepens Wesley’s panic. Dreary as it is, it’s the only home he’s known. The parental schemes are desperate divagations. All is lost in the end and still nobody moves.

In his own, highly idiosyncratic way, Shepard shows us the useless flailings of the securely trapped--those who can never escape the prisons of their own making.

At the Tiffany, casting seems to be the biggest problem. Robinson, a superior actor, looks much too young and healthy as the ravaged Weston. Snodgress goes for the indifferent stare and featureless look of the mental drop-out Ella has become, but she never quite manages to inhabit the part. The character remains just out of her reach--out there, at arm’s length.

Calvert’s Emma is terrific in Act I, but her bratty self-assurance becomes too middle-class suburban as the play progresses. Where is the sense of emotional unmooring?

Only Whitford (who recently played Wesley in the Off Broadway production of “Curse”) gives us the perception of a dislocated character in trouble. His excessively laconic approach to the role is unmistakably the real Sam Shepard. He is the only one who, from the start, seems buffeted by undertows he cannot control. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to save the show.

Gillian Eaton, who replaced Shepard’s sister Roxanne Rogers as director fairly late, and also had to deal with a series of actor defections, may have found it too hard to pick up the pieces (or the right people) on short notice. Her sense of where the play should go is not inaccurate. It just never gets there.

There are other perplexing elements as well. The dilapidation of the house (designed by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio) seems needlessly overdone. And whatever happened to the fact that this is supposed to be a Southern California avocado grove? There’s not an avocado tree in sight.

In a number of ways, “Curse of the Starving Class” is the precursor to Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” (with even later resonances in “True West” and “Fool for Love”). Never mind that “Child” is set in Illinois and “Curse” in the general vicinity of Duarte. It’s the same devastated inner and outer geography.

In “Child,” the accursed descendants of those who did escape family starvation and hell return like addicts--compelled, it seems, to revisit the demented territory.

The archetypal Weston is now glued to the living-room couch, liquor and all, while the archetypal Ella still checks out on a more or less daily basis. She’s retrenched from dating shady real estate developers to dating foolish old men of the cloth--a safer refuge, on balance, with her prospects and denials remaining intact. What changes is the image of the butchered lamb (in “Curse”) transmuted to the unearthed remnants of the “Buried Child.” The galvanizing symbols may differ, but the impulses and the relentless, unmitigating ghosts remain the same.

‘CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS’ Sam Shepard’s play, produced by Patricia Daily, Arthur Master Productions Inc. and Herbert Hurwitz with Loren Stephens, Harriet Newman Leve and Josh Schiowitz at the Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. Director Gillian Eaton. Set and lights Deborah Raymond, Dorian Vernacchio. Costume design Sylvia Moss. Sound design Mark Dornfeld. Production stage manager Walter Wood. Cast Thomas Callaway, Suzanne Calvert, Wayne Grace, Larry Hankin, Michael Hennessey, Andrew Robinson, Carrie Snodgress, Brad Whitford, Ping Wu. Runs Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. until Sept. 7. Tickets $17 to $18.50. (213) 465-0070.