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.

Shepard’s new focus on realism and dysfunctional family life sprang from explicitly autobiographical roots (Peterson, Jane Temple. Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy: Analysis and Assessment. 1989. University of Missouri, PhD dissertation). In the mid-1970s, he revisited the California avocado farm of his father, Sam Rogers, hoping to come to terms with his troubled childhood. Rogers, a former World War II bomber pilot with a long history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism, and anger issues, provided the model for many of the feckless, abusive wastrels in his son’s plays, notably Weston Tate in Curse of the Starving Class, who shares Rogers’s checkered past: former B-24 pilot, failed avocado farmer, spendthrift, and abusive, alcoholic father.

In Curse, a tour de force of post-Vietnam/Watergate disillusionment, Shepard wrings from his own troubled past a sour, blackly humorous hope for forgiveness and closure. Here, the sins of the father are not Weston’s alone but are symptomatic of the betrayal of an entire nation by its supposed protectors. The play singles out larger, more shadowy forces—e.g., vulture-like corporations, banks, and “executive management” that prey on America’s once-mighty agricultural sector—which somewhat mitigates the father’s guilt for his family’s ruin. However, by the trilogy’s second play, Buried Child, Shepard mostly omits Curse’s outsider villains (con men, loan sharks, predatory banks), focusing squarely on the cruelty, delusions, and betrayals of family itself. As if to universalize the claustrophobic tensions of family and isolate them further from a social context, the family in Buried Child is not even given a last name.

True West, the trilogy’s third play, narrows the focus even more, dissecting the bitter lifelong rivalry of two brothers, whose over-the-top vitriol, one-upmanship, and desperate longing for respect distill the malice of family life into a rancorous tête-à-tête. As in Shepard’s first two “Family Trilogy” plays, much of the characters’ violence is directed at objects of cozy domesticity (furniture, food, telephones, utensils, typewriters, etc.), whose destruction symbolizes the mindless damage to loved ones and to the family itself. (In one staging of True West, a plexiglass barrier had to be installed to protect the audience from flying debris.) In all three plays, Shepard stylizes action through absurdist dark humor, shock effects, and allusions to mythology, religion, and gothic literature (including Oedipus, Atreus, Poe, and the Holy Grail), crystalizing the grip of family as eternal, primal, inescapable. Never wholly despairing, Shepard’s plays hold out hope for redemption, even heroism. However, he suggests that the family has always been a “curse” in one way or another. Even at its best, its long tentacles must, eventually, be resisted—or lopped off, as Hercules did to the Hydra—if its children can ever hope to escape and build lives of their own.