Curse of the Starving Class

Sam Shepard (1943-2017), a prolific playwright, actor, and musician with humble roots in the American West and Midwest, produced his first two plays in 1964, when he was barely out of his teens. The bold experimentation of his early plays put him firmly in the American avant-garde, but by the 1970s his work, though still stylized, began to incorporate more believable characters and realistic settings. They also show a new emotional core—notably, the complicated bonds, struggles, betrayals, and mixed allegiances of troubled families.

From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, Shepard produced some of his most acclaimed work, famously his “Family Trilogy,” three plays exploring the turbulent, often violent undertow of American family life in the nation’s economically shattered hinterlands. The first, Curse of the Starving Class (1976), looks at a classic nuclear family (father, mother, son, and daughter) unraveling under the pressures of poverty, alcoholism, infidelity, and violence. Buried Child (1978) intensifies Shepard’s vision of American dysfunction, with a daringly gothic account of an isolated family of misfits, including an incestuous mother and son. In True West (1980), Shepard tightens his focus even further, with a scabrous account of sibling rivalry, namely, two aging brothers locked in a battle for supremacy in their mother’s dilapidated home.