The truth of Sam Shepard's curse on the American dream

CULTURE SHOCK:ASIDE ALTOGETHER from its well-established relationship with the leading living playwright of the US, it is easy to see why the Abbey would want to revive Sam Shepard's 1978 play Curse of the Starving Class. Though set on a small farm in California, it resonates in obvious ways with contemporary Ireland's property crash.

The farm is up for grabs: four characters are trying either to sell or to buy it. Early on, the mother, Ella, has a speech that could be right out of Leitrim in 2006: “Banks are loaning money left and right . . . Everyone wants a piece of land. It’s the only sure investment. It can never depreciate . . . Land will double its value in 10 years. Land is going up every day.” Later, the alcoholic father, Weston, explains how he caught the virus of debt: “Buy refrigerators. Buy cars, houses, lots, invest . . . They all want you to borrow anyhow. Banks, car lots, investors. The whole thing’s geared to invisible money . . . It’s all plastic shuffling back and forth. It’s all in everybody’s heads. So I figured if that’s the case, why not take advantage of it? Why not go in debt for a few grand if all it is is numbers?”

These speeches and the play's whole air of frantic greed make for easy points of entry into Shepard's bleak and baroque drama. But the parallels with our own plight can also be somewhat deceptive. Curse of the Starving Classis not a piece of realism, and it is not easily removed from its specific American context. It is not quite true to say, in fact, that the play is specifically American. It is something more interesting than that: specifically un-American.

What I mean is that, like so much of Shepard’s work, it depends on something profoundly hostile to the essential American narrative. Shepard may look like the most American of artists, but he is, in cultural terms, a classic fifth columnist. He is the insider who opened the city gates in the night and let in the enemy. What’s the enemy? Entropy.

Entropy, the steady loss of energy, the slow decline towards inertia, is a trope of post-war European culture. Its great theatrical manifestation is, of course, in the works of Samuel Beckett. But it is utterly foreign to the American self-image. The US is about dynamism, expansion, the next frontier, the future, the open road, the restless impulse to move on.

Shepard's big idea was to Americanise entropy. In formal terms, this manifests itself in the way he grafts Beckett on to American narratives and mythologies. But the idea itself is simple enough: the United States has run out of road. A culture saturated in frontier thinking has no frontier left before it. (There was a real genius in casting Shepard in the film of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, the space race being the last real attempt by the US at inventing a "new frontier".) What makes this vision tragi-comic, though, is that the desire, the impulse, the idea and the image of the frontier still completely dominate Shepard's people. They are intrepid pioneers caught inescapably in the web of entropy. While everything is winding down, they are still endlessly winding themselves up.

In Curse of the Starving Class,everyone except the son, Wesley, is, at least in imagination, going somewhere. Ella thinks she's off to Europe. Her daughter, Emma, imagines herself on the road to Baja California. Weston and the shady lawyer, Taylor, flee to Mexico. But the truth is that there is nowhere to go. In his moment of clarity, Weston realises that "this is where the line ended! Right here! I migrated to this spot! I got nowhere to go to!" The play's culminating image is of the son becoming the father, trapped in his clothes and with his sins.

All of this makes Curse of the Starving Classa trickier proposition than it might look. The obvious Irish parallels in the themes of property, greed and debt are less comfort than they ought to be. Instead, the play is a very particular amalgam. It is at once mythological and anti-mythological, evoking the myth of the frontier only to reveal its impotence. It combines lyricism and dirty realism. It has images of heavy religious symbolism (there is literal blood of the lamb) and of deliberate obscenity (Wesley urinating on the charts Emma has painstakingly made for a project). It is utterly farcical, with a cruel black humour, and deeply serious. It has to be convincingly American in its speech, atmosphere and sense of place, but at the same time it explicitly mocks any notion of "authenticity". ("You've picked up on the language okay," says Weston to his wife, "but your inflection's off.") It functions sometimes like an absurd melodrama and sometimes like a Robert Rauschenberg happening in which the main point seems to be to fill the stage with a bizarre conjunction of animate and inanimate objects.

It may be that the play itself doesn't fully balance out all of these demands – it feels a little like a messier draft of the play that came hard on its heels, the mesmerising Buried Child.But Jimmy Fay's production certainly struggles to do so. With so many conceptual balls to be kept in the air, it is vital to establish some firm ground to stand on. This production never seems quite sure what's beneath its feet, what it's rooted in. It has very good things – excellent set, costume, lighting and sound design, and a compelling central performance from Joe Hanley as Weston. But it doesn't have the immediacy and urgency that are required to force all the elements into a coherent whole. It is as if the reasons for doing the play – the echoes of contemporary Ireland – seemed so obvious that they did not have to be discovered deep beneath its surface.