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College Theatre Presents

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS

By Sam Shepard Directed by Michael Ryczek

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October 4 – October 21, 2018, Studio

Overview

Curse of the Starving Class balances dark comedy and biting satire in its look at a family fighting to stay alive. The play focuses on the disturbed Tate family—the drunken father, burned-out mother, rebellious teenage daughter, and idealistic son—as they struggle for control of the rundown family farm in a futile search for freedom, security, and ultimately meaning in their lives.

- www.wikipedia.org Biography of Sam Shepard

One of the most famous playwrights in America, Sam Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in Fort Sheridan, IL, to Jane Elaine (Schook), a teacher, and Samuel Shepard Rogers, a teacher and farmer who was also in the army. As the eldest son of a US Army officer (and WWII bomber pilot), Shepard spent his early childhood

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moving from base to base around the US until finally settling in Duarte, CA. In Duarte, Shepard worked on the family’s avocado farm and raised ranch animals. While at high school he began acting and writing and worked as a ranch hand in Chino. He graduated high school in 1961 and then spent a year studying agriculture at Mount San Antonio Junior College, intending to become a vet. In 1962, though, a touring theater company, the Bishop's Company Repertory Players, visited the town and he joined up and left home to tour with them. He spent nearly two years with the company and eventually settled in New York where he began writing plays, first performing with an obscure off-off-Broadway group but eventually gaining recognition for his writing and winning prestigious OBIE awards (Off-Broadway) three years running. He flirted with the world of rock, playing drums for the Holy Modal Rounders, then moved to London in 1971, where he continued writing. Back in the US by 1974, he became playwright in residence at San Francisco's Magic Theater and continued to work as an increasingly well-respected playwright throughout the 1970s and into the '80s. He wrote 44 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. In 1979 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. By 1980, he was the most produced playwright in America after Tennessee Williams.

In 1984 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). He starred in others films, including Resurrection (1980), Baby Boom (1987), The Pelican Brief (1993), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Mud (2012). One of his last works was in the Netflix original series Bloodline. He also directed two films, Far North (1988) and Silent Tongue (1993).

Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described him as "the greatest American playwright of his generation.” He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1994. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease--in Kentucky on July 27, 2017.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Pedro Borges

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Plays

• 1964: Cowboys • 1964: The Rock Garden • 1965: Chicago • 1965: Icarus's Mother • 1965: 4-H Club • 1966: Red Cross • 1967: La Turista • 1967: Cowboys #2 • 1967: Forensic & the Navigators • 1969: The Unseen Hand • 1969: Oh! Calcutta! (contributed sketches) • 1970: The Holy Ghostly • 1970: Operation Sidewinder • 1971: Mad Dog Blues • 1971: Back Bog Beast Bait • 1971: Cowboy Mouth (with Patti Smith) • 1972: The Tooth of Crime • 1974: Geography of a Horse Dreamer • 1975: Action • 1976: Angel City • 1976: Suicide in B Flat • 1977: In a Coma • 1978: Curse of the Starving Class • 1978: Buried Child • 1978: Tongues (with Joseph Chaikin) • 1979: Seduced: a Play in Two Acts • 1980: True West • 1981: Savage/Love (with Joseph Chaikin) • 1983: Fool for Love • 1985: A Lie of the Mind • 1987: A Short Life of Trouble • 1987: The War in Heaven • 1991: States of Shock • 1993: Simpatico • 1996 Tooth of Crime (Second Dance) • 1998: Eyes for Consuela • 2000: The Late Henry Moss • 2004: The God of Hell

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• 2007: Kicking a Dead Horse • 2009: Ages of the Moon • 2012: Heartless • 2014: A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations)

Summary of Curse of the Staving Class This Obie Award-winning play, a darkly comic exploration of the American family psyche, is an expository look at four family members of the Tate family who live on a Californian farm. As the four characters shift into adolescence, adulthood and old age, they face the loss of their farm to debt and developers. Weston is the alcoholic father who has driven his family deep into debt. Ella is the mother who is seeking solace outside of her marriage and dreams of escape to exotic locations. Daughter Emma plans to become a mechanic and pursues her 4-H projects and horseback fantasies with an adolescent’s intensity. Son Wesley looks for a way to keep his family together while changing from a boy to a man. Various secondary characters are interspersed in the story, each trying to exploit the family and take over their land. The play examines the death of the American family as hardship clouds all interaction and any mutual understanding is lost.

- www.samshepard.com Setting:

Duarte, CA, 1976 (The American Bicentennial,) and the impeding future. The action of the play occurs within just a few days

Production History Curse of the Starving Class is a play by Sam Shepard, considered the first of a series on family tragedies. Some critics consider it part of a Family Trilogy that includes Buried Child (1979) and True West (1980).[1] Others consider it part of a quintet that includes Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) The play was initially produced in London at the Royal Court Theatre on April 21, 1977, directed by Nancy Meckler.[3] The play was commissioned by Joseph Papp.[4] Curse of the Starving Class premiered Off-Broadway at the New York Shakespeare Festival, on March 2, 1978, presented by Joseph Papp. The play closed on April 9, 1978.[5]

The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre, running from July 30, 1985 to February 16, 1986. Directed by Robin Lynn Smith, the cast featured Kathy Bates (Ella) and Bradley Whitford (Wesley).[6]

The play was produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, in February 2000, directed by Jim Simpson and featuring Kristine Nielsen, Guy Boyd, Mandy Siegfried, Seckel, Paul Boocock, Ron Faber, Steve Mellor, Dan Moran and

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Chime Serra. The production had original live rock, blues, jazz, punk, and latin-style music, composed and arranged by Steve Bargonetti and Diane Gioia.[7]

A 1994 film version stars James Woods (Weston), Kathy Bates (Ella), Henry Thomas (Wesley), Randy Quaid (Taylor), and Jim Fitzpatrick (Emerson). The film was written by Bruce Beresford and directed by J. Michael McClary.

Source: www.samshepard.com

Characters

The Tate family is a lower middle class, rural California family, trying to hold on to the last shreds of a family bond and traditional living.

Wesley Tate, the son of Weston and Ella, 17 years old. Ella Tate, is the mother of the family, early 40s. Emma Tate, is the daughter of Ella and Weston, 13 years old. Weston Tate, is the father of the family, early 40s. Ellis, is the owner of the Alibi Club, where Weston spends his time drinking. Taylor, is a lawyer who is involved in real estate and is looking to buy the family farm. Sergeant Malcom, a police officer. Emerson and Slater, Thugs. Director’s Note A leader of the avant-garde in contemporary American theatre since his earliest work, Mr. Shepard’s plays are not easy to categorize. They combine wild humor, grotesque satire, myth and a sparse, haunting language to present a subversive view of American life. With Curse he has created a foundation of realism, peppered with jarring symbolism interjected throughout. The symbolism works to undermine the realism of the play. Realism, a style of drama that seeks to represent the world on the stage just as it is in real life, was out of favor in the 1960s, the decade in which Shepard began writing. Symbolic dramas were popular, and Shepard wrote those kinds of plays in his early career.

With Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard moved more toward realism, but retains the symbolic/experimental structure of his earlier plays. The characters in this play are not meant to be accurate representations of real people, nor are we meant to believe that this family had a lamb, brought it inside, and then butchered it. Like the stock gangsters whose entrance signals the end of the play, these symbols break down the illusion of reality. The drama is here to create an impact: whereas the realistic story of the family appeals to our minds and emotions, the symbols affect us on a subconscious level.

Our production seeks to explore this taunt border between the real and the symbolic, the magical and the unimaginable, the invasion of the future onto the past. Shepard is more interested in doing something to the audience rather than saying something to them. His plays don’t contain easy answers. He loves contradictions, he has said that is “where the energy is – where the heat is.”

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You never know, when you do theater, where history is going to catch up to you. While written and set in the mid-1970s, we, as Americans, seem to be struggling with many of the same challenges that face the Tate family - like how to stay true to our roots in the midst of change, the fragments that remain in our psyche from a dysfunctional upbringing, and what the American Dream means to us. This play is about the wild underbelly of the American Dream.

- MR

Themes

The Disappearing Frontier

Shepard’s work, from his first play Cowboys to his more recent scripts, is suffused with images of cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers. When he was asked by a Theatre Quarterly interviewer in 1974 why he wrote about cowboys, Shepard replied: “Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about sixteen or seventeen, who decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and didn’t have any real rules.” Shepard’s fascination with images from the Western frontier also derives from his sense that something great and important in the American character has disappeared, leaving a deep sense of hunger that cannot be satiated and a spiritual starvation. In Curse of the Starving Class, the Tate family are all affected by their unidentifiable sensation that a frontier has disappeared. They live in southern California, a place that was initially a true frontier and then in the depression became the land of dreams for poor migrants from the Dust Bowl and the South. But it, too, is changing, going from being some of the richest farmland in the United States to becoming the suburban sprawl of mid 1970s Los Angeles. Although Shepard has denied that he is trying to write social protest plays, Curse of the Starving Class reads like one. In this play, the frontier disappears because of predatory capitalism (represented largely by Taylor, the lawyer who wants to buy the family’s house in order to create a suburb and who sells Weston worthless land). But capitalism and greed also work on a much more personal level to ruin the family. The frontier, a land where a man could take his fate in his own hands and be the master of his destiny, is entirely gone in this play, replaced by the “curse” that marks this family and the “starving class” to which they belong.

- www.encyclopedia.com

Curses In a way, Curse of the Starving Class is an updating of one of the oldest play cycles, Aeschylus’ Oresteia. That trilogy, written in the fifth century B.C., tells the story of the

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house of the Greek hero Agamemnon, who brought a curse upon his family by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain favorable winds for his army’s voyage to Troy. In the ten years he is gone at the Trojan War, his wife Clytemnestra takes up with another man, and upon Agamemnon’s return, she and her lover murder her husband. Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, must avenge his father’s death. The cycle of violence cannot end—murder must answer murder—until the gods themselves intervene. The family of Curse of the Starving Class seems similarly doomed. They suffer under a “curse” that is peculiar to them, not just to their class. Ella says in the second act that this curse is “invisible but it’s there. It’s always there. It comes onto us like nightmare.” At other points, characters refer to the curse as a germ, as an infection, and as nitroglycerin in the blood. The curse dooms them to violence, poverty, and self-destruction, and the result is always to explode the enclosing structure of the family. Weston’s drunkenness breaks the family apart and, literally, damages the integrity of the house itself when he breaks down the door. Ella sleeps with the lawyer who is trying to take their house away. Emma, when she figuratively becomes a woman (has her first menstrual period), undertakes a life of crime and violence. But it is Wesley who is the real emblem of the curse. Food, the symbol of a healthy family, is literally pissed on by him when he urinates on his sister’s chart of how to cut up a frying chicken. And at the end of the play, after Weston has sobered up and decided to return to the family, Wesley changes into Weston’s old filthy clothes and butchers the lamb that is, in part, the symbol of the fragility of the family. As he reaches manhood, the curse takes hold of him, and he is compelled to behave in a way that ensures the destruction of himself and of his family. The family is helpless to break the curse, but continue to think there is something they can do to break it.

- www.encyclopedia.com

Symbolism Curse of the Starving Class uses symbolism a great deal, but Shepard uses it in a jarring way. His symbols—the lamb, the broken door, the refrigerator, the old car—jump out at the viewer and almost announce “I am a symbol!” But Shepard uses them less as true symbols than as evocative images. This play cannot be “decoded” as an allegory in which we can reduce the refrigerator to a representation of spiritual hunger, the lamb to a representation of sacrifice and innocence, and the door to a representation of the barrier between the family and the outside world. These objects are indeed symbolic, but they are meant to hit the audience with their power. It is shocking to see a lamb bloody and dead; similarly, the centrality of the refrigerator to every scene and the constant opening and closing of its door reminds us of the theme of hunger and starving, but Shepard refuses to nail down its meaning for us.

- www.encyclopedia.com

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Motif Closely connected to the symbolic structure of the play is its use of motif, or a recurring image. Two motifs, very near each other in meaning, recur throughout Curse of the Starving Class: images of inside/outside and images of disease and sickness. Obviously, these two motifs are related to each other, for disease is the intrusion of an entity that should be kept outside the body. Shepard, though, does not define the family’s curse just as a disease, though; this “curse” is more historical and supernatural, like the curses that afflicted the great families of Greek tragedy. The first motif almost overwhelms the play with its omnipresence. The play opens on an image of the breakdown of the barrier between outside and inside, the shattered front door that allows all sorts of undesirable elements to enter the house. As the play continues we constantly see this theme emphasized: conversations in the kitchen are conducted in a normal tone of voice, but conversations between one person in the kitchen and another person outside the room are almost always furious screaming matches; the refrigerator’s constant opening and shutting reminds us that “inside” is an empty place; even the lamb, when brought onstage by Wesley, is placed into a small penned enclosure. Inside has become a hollow, void place to the family, and as a result, they want out—Ella to Europe, Emma to Mexico, Wesley to Alaska, Weston to an alcoholic stupor. Disease and sickness, and images of a poison circulating through the blood, complement the motif of inside/outside. The curse on the family is described by both women as something that breeds internally in Weston and Wesley and is inevitable. Also inevitable, and also treated as a “curse,” is Emma’s menstruation (which is another image of the inside escaping to the outside). Ella warns Emma that swimming during her period could kill her. Even the lamb suffers from an invasion of a harmful force in its body: maggots have infested its digestive tract. When the body’s defenses fail and intruders are allowed to breed inside the body, the play tells us, the body will soon fall to those forces that threaten it.

- www.encyclopedia.com

Faith

There seems to be an underlying sense of a punishing God, or perhaps a God that has deserted this family for reasons unknown. The family seems to sense they have fallen from grace, but don’t have any idea what to do about it. It can play out a bit like the story of Job. It is also hard to ignore the obvious symbolism of the slaughtered lamb being sacrificial. A sacrificial lamb is a metaphorical reference to a person or animal sacrificed for the common good. The term is derived from the traditions of Abrahamic

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religion where a lamb is a highly valued possession. Jesus was thought to be a sacrificial lamb for mankind.

- MR

Highlights from an interview with Sam Shepard for the New Republic:

Shepard: On family. The one thing that keeps drawing me back to it is this thing that there is no escape from the family. And it almost seems like the whole willfulness of the sixties was to break away from the family: the family was no longer viable, no longer valid somehow in everybody’s mind. The “nuclear family” and all these coined phrases suddenly became meaningless. We were all independent, we were all free of that, we were somehow spinning out there in the world without any connection whatsoever, you know. This is ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous to intellectually think that you can sever yourself, I mean even if you didn’t know who your mother and father were, if you never met them, you are still intimately, inevitably, and entirely connected to who brought you into the world—through a long, long chain, regardless of whether you knew them face to face or not. You could be the most outcast orphan and yet you are still inevitably connected to this chain. I’m interested in the family’s biological connections and how those patterns of behavior are passed on. In a way it’s endless, there’s no real bottom to it.

Shepard: On the American Dream. Nobody has actually ever succinctly defined “the myth of the American Dream.” What is the American Dream? Is it what Thomas

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Jefferson proposed? Was that the American Dream? Was it what George Washington proposed? Was it what Lincoln proposed? Was it what Martin Luther King proposed? I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know that it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise.

Shepard: On Betrayal. I feel it’s in my bones somehow. It’s something that has not only affected me personally, being raised up in this country, but that is in the whole fabric of the culture. I can’t put my finger on it and I don’t have the cure for it and I would never pretend to. It certainly feels, as time goes by, that there is a very mysterious betrayal of some kind that we don’t understand. We keep paying for it and paying for it and we don’t know why we’re paying for it. There are all kinds of sociological bullshit you can explain it away with—genocide, for example—but we can’t seem to come to terms with it as Americans. We don’t seem to be able to face what has actually become of us.

Shepard: On his writing style: I am more interested in doing something to the audience rather than saying something to them. I like it right smack in the center of a contradiction – that’s the place to be. That is where the energy is – where the heat is.

- www.newrepublic.com

Terms Defined:

P-39 – one of the principal American fighter aircraft in service during WWII

Jap Zero - a long-range fighter aircraft manufactured by Mitsubishi Aircraft Company, a

part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from

1940 to 1945

Reconnaissance - or scouting is the exploration outside an area occupied by friendly

forces to gain information about natural features and other activities in the area.

Rope Halter - halters that have ever been needed for the purpose of haltering colts. It is

almost impossible to break a colt that is very wild with a rope halter,

Baja California, Mexico - is a peninsula in Northwestern Mexico. It separates the

Pacific Ocean from the Gulf of California.

Larder - is a cool area for storing food prior to use. Larders were commonplace in

houses before the widespread use of the refrigerator, but only amongst the middle

classes.

Boonies – slang for boondocks is an American expression that stems from the

Tagalog word bundók ("mountain"). It originally referred to a remote rural area,[1] but

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now it is often applied to an out-of-the-way city or town considered backward and

unsophisticated. It can also designate a 'mountain

Los Cerritos - (sometimes called Los Cerritos/Virginia Country Club) is a neighborhood

with approximately 700 homes and 2,000 residents located within the Bixby Knolls

neighborhood of Long Beach, California.

Bolier makers - In American terminology, the drink consists of a glass of beer and a

shot of whiskey.

Dipsomaniac - is a historical term describing a medical condition involving an

uncontrollable craving for alcohol

K-Bar Knife - (trademarked as KA-BAR, pronounced /ˈkeɪ bɑːr/ ) is the contemporary

popular name for the combat knife first adopted by the United States Marine Corps in

November 1942 as the 1219C2 combat knife (later designated the USMC Mark 2

combat knife or Knife, Fighting Utility

The Packard was a United States–based automobile built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan. The first Packard automobiles were produced in 1899 and the brand went off the market in 1958. Packard automobiles are highly sought after by collectors today. By the early days of the 20th century, the name Packard was well on its way towards becoming the standard of American automotive quality and perfection. Packard was more than a car, more than a status symbol; it was part of our American heritage.

The Kaiser-Frazer car company was not as glamorous or as classic as the Packard car company. Nevertheless, it still made collectible cars, and has an interesting—if fairly short—history:

Originally “stock car” meant any automobile that retained its original factory configuration. Now, stock cars are used primarily in racing, and the term refers to production-based automobiles that are used for racing (as opposed to racecars built specifically for competition).

Tiger Rose no longer seems to exist in wine or liquor stores, so it was probably a wine of its time. From a variety of brief mentions, however, we can determine that it was an extremely inexpensive wine:

4-h club According to its official website (http://www.4husa.org/), 4-h is “a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.” 4-h is a youth organization run by the Cooperative Extension System of the United States Department of Agriculture; it serves more than 6.5 million members in the United States.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the literary masterpiece for America’s pop mythology of the Wild West. A savagely ironic novel, it follows the rugged adventure of

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three Americans hunting for gold in the mountains of Mexico who find themselves caught in a morality tale of greed and betrayal. Originally published in 1935, the book has captivated millions of readers, including the director John Huston, who immortalized it in his 1948 film starring Humphrey Bogart. This is a timeless story that has much to teach us, for, as we all know, finding the treasure is always secondary to the hunt.

Weber’s Bread wrapper appears to have been an equivalent to Wonder Bread. The Weber’s Bread Company factory was located in Hyde Park in Los Angeles. Weber’s Bread was also criticized for portraying racist Hispanic stereotypes in its advertisements.

Jai-alai is a ball game that originated in Spain’s Basque region and is played in a three-walled court with a hard rubber ball that is caught and thrown with a curved wicker basket glove strapped to one arm. Jai-alai is characterized by its fast playing pace.

The International Harvester Company of Chicago was created by the merger of McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and Deering Harvester Company in 1902. It manufactured farming equipment, construction equipment, gas turbines, trucks, buses.

Currently, California produces about 90% of the nation’s avocado crop.

The globe artichoke is a variety of a species of thistle cultivated as a food.The edible portion of the plant consists of the flower buds before the flowers come into bloom. Leaves are often removed one at a time, and the fleshy base eaten. The fibrous upper part of each leaf is usually discarded.

A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity. . In particular, "curse" may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god or gods, a spirit, or a natural force.

Study Guide Questions

What to look for while watching the play: Do you find yourself sympathizing with any of the characters? Does your sympathy shift at different points from one character to another? Which character do you like the least? Who is the protagonist? Who is the antagonist? How can you tell? How do the design elements (set, sound, lights, costumes) enhance the theatrical experience? If you were designing a production of this play, how would your design be different? Why? How does the audience around you react? How does it feel to be a part of this particular group of people, watching this specific play?

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Shepard’s plays walk a line between reality and theatrically. Look for moments of each. What is your reaction to the plays more unrealistic elements?

What to discuss after seeing the play:

What is “the starving class”? Is anyone in the play a member of the “starving class”? What is the significance of food (or lack thereof) in this play?

What is the “curse” Shepard is referring to in the title of the play? What do you think of the relationship between father and son in this play? How are Wesley and Weston the same? How are they different? What about the relationship between mother and daughter? Mother and son?

What is the significance of the door in Curse of the Starving Class? What is important about keeping outside and inside separate? How does that relate to infection and disease? What do you think of the diseased lamb being brought indoors?

Curse of the Starving Class has been described as “exposing the dark underbelly of the American Dream.” In what ways does Curse of the Starving Class explore the idea of “the American Dream”? What do you think Shepard is saying about America? Are those ideas still relevant?

What is the significance of Weston’s eagle story? What might the eagle symbolize or

represent? What might the cat symbolize or represent?

What do I read next?

Buried Child (1978) is the second of Shepard’s “family trilogy.” It examines many of the

same themes as does Curse of the Starving Class. In 1978, the play won the Pulitzer

Prize for the best American play of the year. The trilogy ends with True West, the story

of two brothers.

Many of the plays of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht use techniques of pastiche and the undermining of naturalism to achieve an effect on the viewer. Some of Brecht’s best-known plays include The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage and Her Children, and Galileo.

The classic story of poor rural people moving to California is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Joad family, impoverished farmers from Oklahoma, pack up their truck and move to find work in California, only to discover that the earthly paradise is not what they imagined. Other Analysis “Tools”:

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What happens in the very last moments of the play? Certainly, the last few minutes, but, more importantly, the last thirty seconds? In that time, what happens or is said, and what does that say about what the play is ‘about?’ In a nutshell, how do the writers drive their point(s) home?

And what is the significance of the title? Why did the writer decide that this was the most quintessential title for his work, do you think? The running time for this production is approximately 2 hours, with one fifteen-minute

intermission.

Please join us for a pre-show discussion Thursday, October 4th at 6:45 – 7:15 pm preceding

the preview performance. Note that pre-show discussions will include the director and designers,

and will be a discussion of the approach to this production.

There will be a post-show discussion following the Friday, October 12th performance. The

post-show will be with director, cast and crew, and will be fielding questions from the

audience.