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Curse of the Starving Class
Curse of the Starving Class
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Author: Sam Shepard Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Format: Softcover # of Pages: 68 Pub. Date: 1976 ISBN-10: 0822202611 ISBN-13: 9780822202615 Cast Size: 2 women, 7 men
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About the Play:
Winner of the 1977 Obie Award.
Curse of the Starving Class is a full-length drama by Sam
Shepard. On the shores of California, four members of a
dysfunctional a family desperately try to hold onto their failing
farm. Dad drunkenly dreams of a hermit's life in the desert while Mom
longs for European sophistication. So when both hatch schemes,
independent of each other, to sell the family farm out from
underneath their two children, a wild battle ensues to save each
person's piece of the American Dream.
Curse of the Starving Class takes us deep into the psyche
of the American family. The setting is a farmhouse in the American
West, inhabited by the Tate clan who have enough to eat but not enough
to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father Weston is
a drunk; the mother Ella a frowzy slattern; the daughter Emma
precocious beyond her years; and the son Wesley a deranged idealist.
As the family decides to sell the house to raise money, the mother
talks of running off to Europe or Mexico; the father sobers up and
tries to take control; the daughter is blown up in the family car;
and the son is left brutalized and bloodied. In the end the
characters become a metaphor for the underside of American life —
benighted innocents pursuing a dream that remains beyond their reach.
This Obie Award-winning examination of the dislocations of
contemporary American society was produced with great success in both
London and New York. The first production of Curse of the Starving
Class was staged at the Royal Court in London in 1977. The first
American production was staged at the Public Theater during the New
York Shakespeare Festival in 1978.
Cast: 2 women, 7 men
What people say:
"Shepard has fashioned a play
of eloquent intensity, whirlwind farce and resonantly poignant
insight." — Time Magazine
"…Shepard's most comic and
most excoriating study of the indomesticity of the American
household…." — New York Times
About the Playwright:
Sam Shepard (1943-2017) was an American playwright and
actor. Born in Illinois and raised in Southern California, he worked
as a farmhand and musician before moving to New York to begin his
career as a playwright. The celebrated author – who New York
Magazine called "the greatest American playwright of his
generation" – wrote more than forty plays, eleven of which
have won Obie Awards. His play Buried Child won the Pulitzer for
drama. Two other plays True West and Fool for Love were nominated for
the Pulitzers as well, and are frequently revived. As an actor he
appeared in more than thirty films, including an Oscar nominated
performance for his role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right
Stuff.
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Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard
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