Pershing Square Signature Center

Sam Shepard's 1978 dysfunctional-family play Curse of the Starving Class, a dark satire of the American Dream set on a crumbling California farm, was revived at the Signature just six years ago, and the New Group's current revival of it in the same theater complex provides no good reason to see it anew. Christian Slater and Calista Flockhart are deeply miscast as the screwy Tate parents—each trying to sell the place out from under the other—as is the gentle-miened Cooper Hoffman as their violent son. (The scenes between Slater and Hoffman should be ticking time bombs; instead, they just tick.) Stella Marcus fares better as the outlaw Lisa Simpson of the factious clan, and Jeb Kreager adds a jolt of real energy in his brief turn as a local barman. But the star of this version is unquestionably a fluffy live sheep named Lois, who provides moments of authenticity that are otherwise rare in Scott Elliott's torpid, disjointed production. When Lois takes a poop onstage, at least she does it literally.

Theater review by Adam Feldman  What makes Samuel D. Hunter's work so consistently beautiful is his ability to capture big things in small forms without being reductive. His plays—which have included The Whale, The Harvest and Greater Clements—are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes (physical and financial limitations, queer identity, crises of family and faith) with endless variety and sympathy. His latest work, Grangeville, is very much in that tradition, and Hunter gatherers won't want to miss it. Hunter's last drama at the Signature Theatre, A Case for the Existence of God, won the 2022 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Like that show, Grangeville—whose world premiere at the Signature is sensitively directed by Jack Serio—has only two actors. Brian J. Smith is Arnold, a gay visual artist who has fled Idaho to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks is Jerry, his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is on her deathbed. For most of the play, their interactions are long-distance, via phone or computer, and their mutual estrangement intially finds them completely in the dark. But as their lines of communication open, the production's lighting (by Stacy Derosier) gradually reveals more of its set (by the design collective dots): brutalist black walls that evoke volcanic rock, the hardened vestige of former heat. Sparks is superb as Jerry,...

D.A. Mindell's play juxtaposes Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their expulsion from Eden with the dilemma of a modern-day pregnant transgender man and his twin sister, a genetic scientist who has made an important discovery about gender dysphoria. Jess McLeod directs the world premiere for Second Stage, which has recently been cast out of its own little corner of heaven—midtown's Tony Kiser Theater—but has found shelter at the Signature Theatre complex.