Blessed Curse 2nd Story’s stunning take on Shepard’s Class BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Well, look at what 2nd Story Theatre figures East Bay audiences are finally ready for. After making their reputation with the lighthearted confections of Short Attention Span Theater, they are starting off their fifth season with the high-protein theater of American myth that few can cook up like playwright Sam Shepard.

This production of Curse of the Starving Class (through October 30) is a powerful evening, only two hours long but requiring two short intermissions for us to catch our breath.

This farm family is no deserving-poor Joads out of Steinbeck but rather the misfit Tates, financial failures and moral bankrupts in the California of the Okies’ dream. Everyone here lets everyone else down sooner or later. Though there’s plenty of grim humor to make us laugh, there’s enough shouting to make Albee’s George and Martha wince. This is a variation on Shepard’s recurring theme: the American Dream proves hollow, as questing westward in hope doesn’t pan out, is all mirage.

Shepard wrote Curse in 1976, at the height of his considerable talents. It’s part of a family trilogy that included Buried Child, which won him a Pulitzer in 1979, and is based on his own dirt-poor upbringing on a farm. But forget the dates; this play strikes universal chords of discord that were familiar when Medea was glowering at her kids.

Cleverly, Shepard doesn’t waste our time with Ma and Pa shouting matches we’ve heard before in other dramas. Imagining those dust-ups is louder. Appropriately, Weston Tate (Vince Petronio), the drunkard man of the house, is absent for the first chunk of the play. His wife, Ella (Lynne Collinson), announces to son Wesley (Kyle Maddock) her plan to sell the farm. Ludicrously, she wants to move with him and daughter Emma (Amy Thompson) to Europe. None of the Tates have recognized, never mind conquered, the old wherever-you-go-there-you-are problem basic to America’s collective consciousness, whether on the personal or imperial level.

Everyone gets their spotlighted soliloquy. Lights dim, and Shepard has each express — more articulately and certainly more lyrically than is realistic for them — the poetry at the heart of every hardscrabble soul here. Director Ed Shea wants to keep things visceral, so when Wesley steps into the kitchen and describes the scent of the orchard’s avocado blossoms, the sizzle of bacon hits our ears, the vivid smell soon to follow as his mother cooks breakfast.

Yes, everyone fails everyone here. Wesley urinates on a drawing his schoolgirl sister has prepared for a class project. (Shepard can be as heavy-handed as commedie buffo: by the end, the son has pulled on his father’s filthy, discarded overalls, signaling generational continuity.) His mother tells him to stop his sister from getting on her wild horse and hurting herself, but when he won’t she just shrugs and says she’ll probably be all right. Even straight-A-student Emma is eager to abandon the family, and her fantasy involves learning how to fix cars so that she can bilk unwary customers.

Shea has directed this at a high decibel level, yet the performances are so well-modulated that it all seems natural — appalling but natural. Collinson plays the mother as a nobody’s-fool hard case, and Thompson’s blithe young schoolgirl shows enough edge for us to foresee a bitter old lady. The incidental characters of snake-eyed lawyer and surly bar owner are played by Mike Zola and Eric Behr with convincingly sinister charm and menace, respectively. Maddock, as the son reluctantly transforming into his father, is effective in Wesley’s meditative moments but less so in his cruel ones, acting mean rather than simply being so.

Just as the Tate family wobbles around the father in uncertain orbit, this production eventually centers around Petronio’s wallop of a performance as a larger-than-life Weston. What’s so remarkable — and brave — is that an oversized rather than understated portrayal can be so convincing. Entering staggeringly drunk, braying and threatening like a one-man tumbling bar fight, Petronio’s Weston is reprehensible (witness the empty refrigerator) yet hard to hate. Weston smugly loves himself and his every self-justified action so much that we soon glimpse him through his own eyes. He’s as full of piss and vinegar as Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan, towering mythic American archetypes that the playwright has always loved like strife itself.

Curse of the Starving Class at 2nd Story is terrific. Even without its full-frontal male nudity and livestock on stage, 2nd Story Theatre and Shepard beats reality TV hands down.