Sheep, Critic Meet Over Sam Shepard

American director Lee Breuer opened his production of Sam Shepard’s “The Curse of the Starving Class” last week at the Saratov Theater Yunogo Zritelya. It was an event that brought in guests from around the world ― including directors, producers and critics from France, Germany, Bulgaria and the United States.

Two weeks ago I reported on how I spent a few days in Saratov as Breuer entered the final stretch of rehearsals before the Oct. 12 opener. Since one of the best theater critics in Los Angeles was on hand for that first night, I thought it made sense to turn this article over to him.

Steven Leigh Morris is an English-born playwright and critic who has covered the theater beat in Los Angeles for the L.A. Weekly for decades. (Out of curiosity, I asked how long it took him to lose his British accent, and he said, “Oh, a few seconds.”)

On the day following the opening of “The Curse of the Starving Class,” I pulled out my camera, Steven took up a position on the street in front of the theater and he shared his thoughts. Some were gems.

Morris compared “Starving Class” to Breuer’s famous production of “Mabou Mines Dollhouse,” an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse,” which“got turned inside out, upside down and rattled” in Breuer’s hands.

Shepard’s play, Morris said, was “filtered through an MTV parody of just about every myth that’s been carved out of the American Southwest.”

“I don’t know how Sam Shepard would feel about that, and I’m not absolutely sure how the Russian audiences felt about it,” the critic went on. But “people under 30 in the house were just eating it up, and the people over 30 looked generally perplexed.”

Morris was particularly impressed by Breuer’s use of a live sheep. The sheep “put in a breathtaking performance,” Morris noted, and not only because it literally chewed the scenery at times.

At one moment the sheep stood in a bathtub full of flowers, staring out over the audience with ― pardon the mixing of metaphors ― plaintive doe eyes. It was, Morris declared, the moment that the show “landed.” This was when he knew the show was “going to end well.”

Following a thought-scattering interruption by a man with a clacking cart going by us on the street, Morris came back with what I thought was his most daring and funniest observation.

“I don’t want to be overly sentimental,” the Los Angeles critic said, covering his backside in the event that anyone at home ever sees this video, “but there was something slightly spiritual about” Breuer’s use of the sheep.

Boom! Could there have been a tear in that critic’s eye? Naw…

Breuer himself knew perfectly well that he was going out on a limb with his radical interpretation of Sam Shepard. In an interview with the Saratov-based “Vzglyad” newspaper, he talked about how critics often misunderstand, or simply fail to understand, his work.

“I think we’ll probably catch it for this production, too,” he said. “There will people who will write that this is disgusting and not funny. That it is not theater but pornography.”

On the other hand, Breuer gave what may be the finest definition I have ever heard of the “avant-garde,” of which he has been a leader for 30 or more years.

“The word ‘avant-garde’ means ‘before the guard,’” Breuer explained. “And ‘guard’ here means an army. In other words, these are the people who get shot before the general army makes its move. They are the ones who lay down the road which everyone else will take. I’ve often taken bullets from various ‘snipers.’ Newspapers love to whale away at avant-garde theater directors.”

That may be true. But not this one.

To hear Steven Leigh Morris’ comments in their entirety, click on the picture below.