Curse of the Starving Class was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1977 and published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1976. It marks Shepard’s transition from the hallucinatory experimentalism of his early work (plays like La Turista and The Tooth of Crime) to the family dramas that would dominate his mature career. The Tates are the first of Shepard’s dysfunctional Western families — poor, violent, trapped on land they cannot afford and cannot leave.
Weston Tate is a drunk who has mortgaged the family’s avocado ranch to pay bar tabs. Emma, his wife, plans to sell the ranch herself and flee to Europe. Their son Wesley fills the refrigerator obsessively (the title’s “starving class” is literal — the family’s refrigerator is always empty), while their daughter Emma (sharing her mother’s name and her mother’s desire to escape) dreams of riding to Mexico on horseback.
The play’s central metaphor is the “curse” — hereditary dysfunction that passes from parent to child regardless of will or intention. Wesley, who begins the play determined to be nothing like his father, gradually becomes his father: wearing his clothes, drinking his bourbon, pissing on his daughter’s school project. The curse is not supernatural but biological and behavioral — the accumulated habits of poverty, violence, and despair that constitute a family’s inheritance.
Shepard wrote the play during a period of heavy drinking and marital breakdown (his first marriage was disintegrating), and its autobiographical resonance is unmistakable. But the play’s power transcends confession: it renders a specific American condition (rural poverty, the myth of land ownership, the impossibility of upward mobility for those without capital) with theatrical poetry that lifts it to universality.
Collecting Curse of the Starving Class
First edition (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1976): Included in the collection Angel City, Curse of the Starving Class & Other Plays.
Market values:
- Bobbs-Merrill first edition: $30–$60
- Signed copies: $75–$200
- Seven Plays collection (Bantam, 1981): $15–$40
The play that launched Shepard’s family-drama phase and opened the path to Buried Child and True West.