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Sam Shepard (Samuel Shepard Rogers VII; born 1943) began his career as a playwright in the lively off-off-Broadway scene of the 1960s and became one of the United States' most prolific and acclaimed dramatists. He was also a film actor, a stage and film...

November 5, 1943. Samuel "Steve" Shepard Rogers "...plunged into the world head first and, although covered with blood, my attitude was very friendly.... "My name came down through seven generations of men with the same name each naming the first son the...

Although Sam Shepard has written more than forty plays and five screenplays, including collaborating on Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) and Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984); has directed two movies based on his scripts, Far North (1988)...

NEW YORK A Signature Theater Company presentation of the play in three acts by Sam Shepard. Directed by James Houghton. Set, E. David Cosier; costumes, Teresa Snider-Stern; lighting, Jeffrey S. Koger; sound, Red Ramona; stage manager, Donald Fried. Artistic director, Houghton. Opened April...

Curse of the Starving Class Shepard has cultivated a peculiar comic sense. He is a parodist with a pan as dead as a doornail. There are few punch lines, few opportunities to laugh out loud, few lines that seem functs when read...

Sam Shepard is phenomenal. He is the best practicing American playwright, I think, now that Tennessee Williams is doodling…. Curse of the Starving Class … is another of Shepard's heartbreakers—it contains so much, yet it finally comes to not enough…. [It] deals with California sheep raisers and thus immediately strikes a distinctive Shepard note. He often deals with non-urban people, often in the West; most of our playwrights are urban in setting and feeling….

[In Curse of the Starving Class] Shepard displays some of the same anti-capitalistic bias and revolutionary fervor Shaw once did, but here without the novelty in form that is almost a trademark of Shepard's earlier plays. Nothing of the rock culture in this one; instead, we are given an old-fashioned, evidently autobiographical, family problem play, mostly naturalistic (though punctuated by poetic cadenzas) and so banal in its outlines as to make us wonder if this alltime favorite genre has not run i...