The first time I saw the actor Jayden Key, he was kneeling in the hot, dry grass of a park in downtown Houston, smiling through Texas sweat, eyes as painterly blue and hair as immaculate blond as a World War II-era German propaganda poster child. It was summer 2017 on a weeknight, a quarter hour
Pulitzer Prize-Winnng Sam Shepard‘s CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS displays the lives of the working-class Tate family as they navigate everything from suffocating debt, to teenage crime, to marital distress and back again. Checking the fridge for food (that is never there) is a regular routine-turned-ritual in this household that is deteriorating from the inside out.
Today’s theater world is a fallow place. There are no recent playwrights whose work commands respect and opening-night buzz like those of theatrical Rushmore icons Edward Albee, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Christopher Durang. August Wilson, Sam Shepard, even Neil Simon. Granted, Durang and Stoppard are not yet Old Dead Playwrights but their output has been