Shepard tends to exaggerate, electrify, and sheep

"We'd be in Europe, a whole new place," Ella (Kristine Nielsen) says to her estranged daughter during the first act of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class. "But we'd all be the same people," Emma (Mandy Siegfried) responds. This two-line exchange expresses the essential truth at the heart of Shepard's play; we are powerless to change our identities and realities. By presenting a brutally honest glimpse into the heart of a profoundly dysfunctional American family, Jim Simpson's production points to the absurdity of human existence. Full of farce, satire, and shocking visual devices, Curse of the Starving Class reveals the tragic spiritual starvation of the disillusioned Tate family—each character blindly searches for connections to the substance of life, but finds only emptiness.

T. CHARLES ERICKSON/YALE REPERTORY THEATER Abandoned by her dreams of a better life, Ella (Kristine Nielsen) clings to the edge of sanity—and the table.

Despite its weighty messages, Shepard's play hides its essential tragedy under a comic veneer. The play opens with a short guitar solo delivered by a performer who remains onstage throughout, providing music which ranges in style from Latin to rock. His presence is disconcerting, highlighting the absurdity of the actions occurring center stage. Shocking visuals abound in the exaggerated world Simpson brings to life: a live lamb joins the cast, and Wesley (Danny Seckel) urinates on his sister Emma's posters, runs naked across the stage, and engages in a graphic feeding frenzy. A stylized sheriff (Paul Boocock) and a club owner (Dan Moran), clad in colorful, patchwork leather garments, play small parts that round out the character-driven humor in the play.

The acting, while consistently big, brash, and flamboyant, remains true to the nature of the drama. Shepard conveys his themes by assailing us with cariacatured individuals who assume symbolic significance by virtue of their exaggeration. The actors portraying the Tate family turn in excellent performances, particularly Kristine Nielsen, who shines as the beleaguered and empty housewife searching in vain for happiness. Nielsen's gestures, facial expressions, and emotionally modulated voice convey the motivations of her character as clearly as the words that she speaks. Near the end of the play we watch Nielsen's Ella cling to, and finally abandon, her cherished illusions of a better future as she stretches her tired body over the hard surface of the kitchen table.

The Tate's run-down farm in the 1970s is a set evocative of the disintegration of dreams. It consists of several old, rusty appliances accompanied by a table and four mismatched chairs. Throughout the play, various pieces of splintered wood, laundry, and half-devoured food litter the floor of the kitchen. The stage is surrounded by a border of dirt, its front edge finished in jagged, raw linoleum. For the majority of the play, bright lighting reinforces the rawness and tragedy of Shepard's characters.

On the whole, Curse of the Starving Class gives a coherent, moving, farcical portrayal of the Tate's struggles. There are, however, several glaring weaknesses—the most notable of which is the rebirth of the father character Weston (Guy Boyd). Until his redemption, Weston is an insatiable drunkard and an ineffectual parent—then he suddenly becomes the very model of consideration and domesticity. This metamorphosis is both unrealistic and implausible. Another flaw adds somewhat to the play's appeal, but compromises its impact: after the first act, the action degenerates into slapstick. Gratuitous sight gags—like the appearance of a skinned lamb carcass—detract from the overall dramatic effect. The play is also rather long, weighing in at approximately two-and-a-half hours.

Despite its flaws, Curse of the Starving Class resonates long after its dramatic conclusion. Shepard and Simpson create characters who are at once comic and tragic, related and detached, identifiable and foreign. We catch occasional glimpses of our own humanity in the members of the Tate family, but it is a humanity twisted nearly beyond recognition to desperate and yearning proportions. We are left with emptiness and the bitter realities of the characters that Shepard creates. Despite the action that stuns us throughout the course of the play, the Tate family's existence is essentially unchanged in the end. In Weston's words to his son, "There's no more miracles. They're all used up."

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