In The Family Way

Director Sylvaine Strike brings her version of Sam Shepard’s Curse Of The Starving Class to the stage early next month

- Bruce Dennill

Dysfunctional families like the one portrayed in Curse Of The Starving Class are a universal phenomenon, as is struggling to survive, but combining the two in one story is more specific. Have you fitted your production to a South African context? And if not, how are you hoping audiences will connect?

Sylvaine Strike: It needs the transposition to the US. It would be too much to have this as just another Karoo story. That said, though it’s a 40-year-old play, the metaphor it uses of commerce encroaching on farmland is still relevant.

Also, it’s autobiographical. Sam Shepard, whom we lost last year, wrote it from the perspective of Wesley, the son in the story. He grew up in the Fifties with a fighter pilot father who came back from fighting deeply dysfunctional. The women in Shepard’s life were essentially trying to keep broken pieces together all the time.

I’ve set my version in the early Seventies – our Angola war, their Vietnam. The themes are the same: brainwashing regarding who was targeted as the enemy; blatant racism; the failure to achieve anything worthwhile …

Before this play premiered in 1978, Shepard had written