Home Is Where the Heart Sinks: CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS

Nearly all great American plays are about families. The comedies, like You Can't Take It with You, celebrate the ability of disparate relatives to unify against the outside world. The tragedies, like A Long Day's Journey into Night, mourn the often unbridgeable chasm between intimacy and true affection. Sam Shepard, the most protean of active American playwrights, has written about revolution and land reform and organized crime and the decline of the West (in both the Spenglerian and the John Wayne senses), but his laconic truisms sound most universal when he focuses on the tightly confined agonies of blood kin. He especially comprehends their symbiotic bonding: time and again in his plays, family members reverse roles or take on each other's characteristics because the nature of the interaction between them matters more than who plays which part. They are trapped in patterns so central to their lives that any liberation or enlightenment in one member is immediately offset by the regression of another.

Curse of the Starving Class, a 1977 Shepard work, has been powerfully revived off-Broadway in a production that demonstrates it may be his best play. Shepard charts with savage humor the cruelties exchanged among a grindingly poor rural family. Slaughtering their animals has inured them to violence. Sharing the isolation of farm life has made them eager to sneak off. Knowing one another's sore spots has only rendered their aim more deadly. The plot resembles the save-the-homestead movies released last year: the farm is hopelessly insolvent but is sought by developers. Shepard, however, does not indulge in sentiment about vanishing ways of life. His focus is on familial stealth and cunning, on betrayals of husband by wife, brother by sister, parent by child. In the end, none of them gets away. Their dreams, like most dreams in Shepard's plays, culminate in explosive violence.

Shepard's faintly surreal yet lyrical text demands extraordinary acting. The players must give credibility to moments of farce, such as a refrigerator filled with nothing but artichokes, or a brother urinating on his sister's chart for a 4-H science project. Yet they must also preserve enough dignity to bring off sustained poetic speeches, including a climactic account of a midair battle between an eagle and a cat who doom each other to a fatal fall. The showiest part is the father (Eddie Jones), a brutal alcoholic who undergoes an overnight conversion, too late, into a sober and responsible man. His place as the family menace is then taken over by the son (Bradley Whitford), a sensible if none too bright handyman who becomes a bedeviled catatonic. Karen Tull is a giddy, then abruptly deadly daughter. The most remarkable aspect of Director Robin Lynn Smith's production is the showcase it provides for Kathy Bates, 37, who since her Tony-nominated performance in 1983's night, Mother has firmly established herself as one of the nation's foremost character actresses. Although Bates is capable of gothic comic excess, here she underplays the mother as a frustrated housewife, aware of a larger world of culture and glamour outside somewhere but awkwardly uncertain about just what she is missing. Bates perfectly balances the ruthless selfishness of the mother's ambitions, and her shameless attempt at larceny to fulfill them, against the depth of her yearning to rise from the starving to the self-assured class. --By William A. Henry III