I’ve got to admit, I don’t know whether those Wilma Theater cats are really happy with the theater that they’ve got. It’s a great big cavernous space, with, I don’t know, three hundred seats or something like that. It can’t be mixed around the way a traditional black box can, though it doesn’t have that weird grandeur that proscenium spaces sometimes have. I don’t know, do you think they like it? Was this is the idea when they built the new theater? “Let’s do a bunch of plays in a space where we can’t rearrange the spacial arrangement between play and audience.”
“Let’s do a Sam Shepard play!”
I don’t really like Sam Shepard. I think he is like the American Chekhov, and honestly, I don’t much care for Chekhov either, because I think both of these are boring. Curse of the Starving Class is my least favorite of the Sam Shepard plays. On the face of it, it seems like something that really ought to be appealing, especially in this day and age: Wesley, Emma, and Ella are the broke-down family (son, daughter, and wife, respectively) of the shiftless drunkard Weston.
Weston, who was a pilot in a war (the second World War, I think, but it could be any war), largely uneducated and unsupported by society at large, gets swindled, wracks up debts, sells his house to pay them off, only to lose more and more, ultimately jeopardizing his family’s life.
With the slow death of the American middle class, Curse is a pretty chilling look at the future that’s probably in store for all of us some day soon — scraping by with less and less, putting the little we have into hock just to stay afloat — and Sheperd’s writing has got a kind of eerie, mystic quality to it that almost makes up for the lack of anything that looks explicitly like, say, plot, or character development.
The problem is that Richard Hamburger (the director of this production) has got the play up on this sprawling set on the Wilma stage, which is actually bigger than my house. There are no walls, and no boundaries that the actors consistently respect as walls, but even the general square delineated by the major household appliances is enormous. Where you’d expect the characters to be tripping over each other, where every argument ought be flush with intimacy, every unexpected guest ought to be an instant but subtle threat … instead there’s just plenty of space for everyone.
The staging robs the play of its urgency, of its tension, of that kind of bubbling, barely-repressed rage that I feel like you kind of want in a play like this, especially considering that there isn’t anything else there. The repressed stuff is the play, you know?
That bit was mostly just boring, but they also do a couple things that actually irritated me. The first was that they had an actual lamb that they brought out and had onstage, and let me tell you something about lambs: you cannot train them to say their lines in the right spots. It just doesn’t happen — those little fuckers will bleat whenever they want to. Sometimes it’ll be funny when it’s supposed to, sometimes it’ll be funny when it’s not supposed to, sometimes it will be distracting. Who the hell knows?
The other thing is that they’ve got this stove in it that has what I think is an actual gas line attached to the burner? (I think possibly they’ve just got a propane tank in the oven part that they ran up to the burner.) Anyway, they light the burner and cook some ham and eggs on it.
This is the second show I’ve seen where someone’s had a working stove that they’ve used to cook food onstage, and it never gets less annoying. The thing is, in the first place, I can’t smell the ham and eggs from back in row K, so it’s not like you’re adding to my experience here. And in the second place — I’ve already accepted the fact that I’m watching a play, that this isn’t a real oven. You’ve already GOT my suspension of disbelief, but the second you light an actual burner on the stove and start cooking ham and eggs with it, suddenly all I can think about is that fucking burner.
When I should be paying attention to the subtleties of the performance (and let me just say again, who looks at a theater the size of the Wilma and thinks, “Hey, let’s do something that relies heavily on subtlety?”), instead all I can think about is that noisy lamb and the functional gas burner that they put onstage. Look at this, I’m trying to write a review right now, and all I can remember from the play is the sheep and the stove.
The question that I always have is this: it must take a lot of work, a lot of logistical wrangling to get this kind of thing together. Where do you get a sheep, man? I don’t even know. How long do you think they spent building that functioning stove, or the sink that had actual running water?
How did Richard Hamburger spend all that time getting all this stuff together, and didn’t notice that his set was too big?
S.O.E. 