magical moments #2: slater and shepard shepherding the american dream

Lois the sheep steals the show in New Group’s Curse of the Starving Class (photo by Monique Carboni)

“Baaaaaaaaah.”

Once upon a time, William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W. C. Fields, warned, “Never work with animals or children.” While there are no young children in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, a sheep named Lois steals the New Group’s hit-or-miss revival at the Pershing Square Signature Center through April 6.

Live animals are no strangers to New York theater. In 2014 alone, Toby the white rat helped establish the character of protagonist Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Pepe the dog was carried onstage by Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a rotating pair of felines appeared in You Can’t Take It with You, and Violet the dog was a key plot point in Of Mice and Men with James Franco and Chris O’Dowd. In 2016, Heiner Goebbels’s awesomely bizarre spectacle De Materie boasted one hundred bleating sheep in its cast at Park Ave. Armory. A goose was a standout in Jez Butterworth’s Tony-winning play The Ferryman in 2019. And two havanese shared the role of Honey in Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth last year while McDonald, as Mama Rose in Gypsy, is currently cuddling Chowsy the canine eight times a week at the Majestic.

In 2016, New Group artistic director Scott Elliott helmed a powerful revival of Shepard’s Pulitzer-winning Buried Child at the Signature’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, with Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, and Paul Sparks. In 2019, Terry Kinney directed an explosive version of Curse of the Starving Class for the Signature Theatre Company on the Irene Diamond Stage, so Elliott’s decision to bring his own take on the tale of a family hungry for the American dream but failing miserably seems an odd choice so soon, especially because it doesn’t feel different enough from Kinney’s adaptation to warrant another production in the same complex, albeit in a different theater there.

Christian Slater stars as Weston Tate, the patriarch of a dysfunctional family struggling to survive in a dismal world they have created for themselves. Weston is a gambler and alcoholic who disappears for large periods of time and is banking on a piece of desert property he bought to offer respite from the maelstrom. Calista Flockhart is his wife, Ella, who is fed up with it all and is secretly trying to sell the house so she can move to Europe and live a more refined and elegant life. Their son, Wesley (Cooper Hoffman), is a wastrel who might be following in his father’s less-than-stellar footsteps, while his younger sister, the teenage Emma (Stella Marcus), wants to get as far away as possible from her doleful existence.

Slater, who was last onstage twenty years ago in New York in The Glass Menagerie — which features miniature glass animals — portraying Tom to Jessica Lange’s Amanda, Sarah Paulson’s Laura, and Josh Lucas’s Gentleman Caller at the Ethel Barrymore on Broadway, is magnetic as the shattered Weston, and Marcus imbues Emma with a tortured wanderlust, but the show too often strays from its path, although it benefits from the intimacy of the theater, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set practically in the audience’s lap.

In the first act, Wesley coops up Lois the sheep in the kitchen because the warmth of the room is good for her maggot infestation. It’s an effective if obvious metaphor for the Tate family itself, which is rotting from the inside. The entire show takes place in the kitchen, where there is never any food in the refrigerator and where Wesley urinates on his sister’s 4-H project involving a chicken.

Christian Slater bonds with Lois the sheep in Sam Shepard revival (photo by Monique Carboni)

And then it happens.

In the second scene of the second act, Lois is back, penned in next to the small kitchen table on which Weston had previously passed out but is now, surprisingly, folding laundry. Slater delivers a fabulous monologue to the sheep, who gazes deep into Weston’s eyes, as if understanding every word he’s saying, and also turning to make eye contact with individual members of the audience, ensuring we are paying attention. It’s a spectacularly moving and intimate connection; I felt a chill through my body when Lois looked right at me.

Weston comforts the sheep, explaining, “There’s worse things than maggots, ya know. Much worse. Maggots go away if they’re properly attended to. If you got someone around who can take the time. Who can recognize the signs. Who brings ya in out of the cold, wet pasture and sets ya up in a cushy situation like this. No sheep ever had it better. It’s warm. It’s free of draft, now that I fixed the door. There’s no varmints. No coyotes. No eagles. No —”

Metaphors abound, especially given what is going on across the globe today, with America a country of sheeple fenced in by their political bubbles, a nation rotting from the inside. In case we missed that idea earlier, Weston tells Lois the story of a possibly suicidal eagle that is actually swooping low to get some balls (castrated sheep testicles).

Shepard wrote Curse of the Starving Class in 1978, shortly after Watergate and on the cusp of Reaganism. It is part of an unofficial trilogy that also includes Buried Child and True West, and maybe a quintet along with Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind as well. Shepard, a man’s man who died in 2017 at the age of seventy-three, was a master chronicler of the death of the American dream as seen through families just trying to make it through each day.

Elliott’s production might too often go off the rails, but it’s worth experiencing just for that magical moment when a lone sheep captures our hearts, imploring us to see what’s happening — and to do something about it.

“Baaaaaaaaah.”

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