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New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class' Doesn't Satisfy
When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in 'Curse of the Starving Class' — it's with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak. The Tates' fridge is almost always empty, and there's a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group's lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class,' which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.) But the cause wasn't a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze 'like some rank old animal' and breaking the door. Though Weston's tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they're part of the starving class, or if it even exists. The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all. Like Shepard's 'Buried Child' and 'True West,' 'Curse of the Starving Class' is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical. Scott Elliott's direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard's work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. Emma rhapsodizes about her imagined future life in Mexico as a car mechanic; Wesley recreates the sounds and feelings of the evening Weston came drunkenly crashing into the house. Even the land developer has a speech about the powers and ambitions of corporate America. Instead of incorporating these moments into the play's more straightforward goings-on, Elliott further heightens them by setting a prominent spotlight (lighting by Jeff Croiter) on the character, who delivers these lines not to the rest of the cast but to the audience. These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard's script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances. When the typically passive Ella erupts into an expletive-driven rage later in the show, Weston calmly critiques her inflection of the words, saying: 'Something doesn't ring true about it. Something deep in the voice. At the heart of things.' That could easily apply to the acting as well, which lacks intimacy and urgency. Flockhart's Ella and Hoffman's Wesley aren't just impassive; they're a little dull. Slater does the best work with his take on Weston, whose violent outbursts and wild, lurching movements provide the production with some spark. That's not including Lois, the 4-year-old California Red sheep who nearly steals the show as an animal who belongs to the Tate family and is afflicted with something nasty. Truly, some of Lois's bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart. (Lois is a professional, who was also a featured performer in the living Nativity section of the 'Radio City Christmas Spectacular.') I'm being facetious, but only a little bit — some of the funniest moments on the night I saw the show were unintentional, when a vegetable went flying into an audience member's open hand, or when Lois interrupted a tense argument with a few loud, enthusiastic 'baas' toward the audience. It's telling if a production's gravitas and humor comes mostly from its livestock, especially if it's a staging of a Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class' is a work that intentionally leaves its characters bereft, but shouldn't do the same for its audience.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sundance Veteran John Cooper Joins Northern California's True West Film Center as Artistic Director
John Cooper, former director of the Sundance Film Festival, has been named the True West Film Center's new Artistic Director. As artistic director, Cooper will focus on crafting and implementing the artistic vision guiding all programs, including education, film screenings and the yearly True West Film Festival. Cooper's position comes as the True West Film Center prepares to move to the James Redford Campus with a three-screen cinema and educational spaces opening this summer in Healdsburg, Calif., the historic wine country town north of San Francisco. More from Variety 'The Stringer' Review: Who Took the Historic Vietnam War Photo Known as 'Napalm Girl'? A Riveting Documentary Says the Answer Lies in a Conspiracy 'By Design' Review: Juliette Lewis Becomes a Chair in a Bold if Baggy Body-Swap Sundance Movie Sundance Prizewinning Director Lemohang Mosese's New Film 'Ancestral Visions of the Future' Joins Memento Intl.'s Slate Prior to Berlinale Premiere (EXCLUSIVE) 'I am delighted to welcome John to True West as our new Artistic Director,' executive director Kathryn Philip said. 'Over a decades-long career, Cooper has demonstrated visionary artistic leadership, exceptional curatorial know-how, and a passion for supporting independent filmmakers. As we look toward opening our cinemas and expanding our programs to serve more Sonoma County residents than ever before, I am thrilled that we will do so with the benefit of Cooper's deep experience and well-honed creative instincts.' Cooper was at the frontline of American independent film at the Sundance Institute for more than 30 years, eventually working as director of the festival from 2010 to 2020. During his time there, he launched the Art House Convergence and led the festival's expansion of satellite events in New York, Los Angeles, London and Hong Kong. Before his time at Sundance, he led Outfest, Los Angeles' annual festival celebrating LGBTQ+ films, from 1995 to 1998. 'I am honored to join the True West team at this pivotal moment,' Cooper said in a statement. 'As a longtime champion of art house cinemas, I know that film has the power to bring people together. I am inspired and invigorated by this opportunity to build a vibrant film culture in the North Bay.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Grammy Predictions, From Beyoncé to Kendrick Lamar: Who Will Win? Who Should Win? What's Coming to Netflix in February 2025
Chicago Tribune
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Fool for Love' has its moments but stops short of the Steppenwolf of old
Sam Shepard, scribe of the angst-ridden American prairie, was the playwright who made Steppenwolf's bones. In 1982, the theater company's signature staging of his 'True West' was the apotheosis of a certain kind of Chicago-style theater: aggressive, in-your-face, compelled by uncontrollable impulses, no holds barred. Shepard himself did not actually have a close relationship with Steppenwolf in that era, the late playwright once told me, but no matter. The two are linked in Chicago theater mythology. And so when Steppenwolf revives 'Fool for Love,' Shepard's raw 1983 drama about a compulsively dysfunctional couple, May (Caroline Neff) and Eddie (Nick Gehlfuss), who resemble combatants in a human rodeo as they lunge at each other during a single night in their seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, it intersects with its own history. Especially since 'Fool for Love' itself was produced there in a similarly famous production with Rondi Reed and William Petersen. Given that context, the new staging from director Jeremy Herrin also featuring Tim Hopper as the Old Man and Cliff Chamberlain as the whiplashed latecomer to the party, feels too tame. The show has its potent moments, mostly courtesy of the gutsy Neff, who throws herself courageously at the play without enough coming back her way, and the production knows how to exploit the play's sardonic humor. But I doubt you'll walk out the door feeling like the case was made for doing this play in the here and now. The production feels like it operates from the outside, looking back at the play quizically, as an external thing, a past moment, rather than operating in real-time and pouring out its insides from its molten core. I found myself wondering if the issue was the age of the script itself. Steppenwolf certainly has not lost its knack for intensity and fearlessness, as anyone who saw the Broadway-bound 'Purpose,' 'Little Bear Ridge Road' or 'Bug' can attest. This kind of amoral exploration of raw sexual desire certainly clashes with today's more moralistic theater sensibility; time (and copycats) have made the play's formative dreamscape feel much less radical. The play also has to compete with the memory of Robert Altman's 1985 film version of 'Fool for Love,' which, despite flopping at the box office, understood this landscape and gave these two characters real nobility in their hapless obsession with each other. But I don't think that's the issue. 'Fool for Love' still has much to say about what self-delusional parents can do to their children and, once so done to, how those children fight to contain the damage even as it is writ large on their psyches. This is a play about compulsion and giving over to raw desire — hardly archaic in a country whose moral center currently seems as elusive as a Mohave porcupine. And, to some degree, the play is about the pure willfulness of sexual love and a meditation on the pluses and minuses thereof. All things still worth exploring in the theater. Herrin's show has an atmospheric set from Todd Rosenthal, red neon signs and all, and plenty of other Southwestern iconography in its gestalt, but that can't just be the setting. It should ooze from the show's rhythms. The direction needs more of the stultifying heat of a nighttime human rodeo in the desert, more of its sensual soundscape, a better acquaintance with its pauses and silences and its latent impact on human desire. It doesn't seem to fully understand its ability to function as a dangerous aphrodisiac. 'Fool for Love' is centered on the motel room passion between the two central characters but there is an Old Man off to the side, telling the story. Herrin seems to have gone for simplicity with how he conceived Hopper's role, and fair enough. But there's heavy symbolic weight on this character's back and, somehow, the way he is rooted to his chair throughout doesn't entirely work in this incarnation, rendering him too peripheral. Hopper is a superb actor, as is intermittently clear here, and yet he somehow feels stuck there in a separate world, distinct from the one the Old Man actually has conceived. In more ways than one. The show is worth seeing for Neff's raw determination and I suspect it will deepen over time. But I wish Gehlfuss, who has much talent, would stop playing a cowboy with a rope, which he does perfectly well, and wrestle with being one instead. Then we might feel that this couple has no choice about what they are doing with and to each other and have to deal with all the implications of that on the way home. Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@ Review: 'Fool for Love' (3 stars) When: Through March 23 Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes Tickets: $20-$138 at 312-335-1650 and Originally Published: February 9, 2025 at 1:32 PM CST
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
True West prepares to open at Corn Stock Theatre
PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — When two brothers who are polar opposites are stuck together at their mother's house while she's on vacation, what can go wrong? Find out at Corn Stock Theatre's fourth production of their winter season, 'True West'. Written by Sam Shepard and directed by Blake Stubbs, True West is a play that touches on jealousy and resentment between brothers from a broken household. When Lee (played by Drake Newnum) unexpectedly shows up at Mom's house after spending years in the desert, Austin (played by Patrick Walsh) is forced to juggle his work and his already unsteady relationship with his brother. True West opens at Corn Stock Theatre on Friday, February 7th, where they will also announce next year's winter season. To buy tickets for the show, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
