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.