Curse of the Starving Class Essay | Critical Essay #1

Curse of the Starving Class Critical Essay #1

Barnhisel teaches writing and directs the Writing Center at the University of Southern California. In this essay, he examines themes of disease, invasion, and breaching in Curse of the Starving Class.

Although it is not a symbolic drama whose meaning lies only in the interaction of its symbols, neither is Curse of the Starving Class a truly realistic drama, in which the audience is meant to empathize with the characters as real people. Critic Stephen J. Bottoms identifies Shepard's style, or school, as "grotesque realism" and writes that "the action of Curse veers wildly between a range of clashing generic styles, from kitchen sink banality to exaggerated melodrama, and from broad comedy to ritualized symbolism, thwarting any attempt to read into it a unified depiction of a stable or unified real world." With the style of the play "veering wildly" as it does, viewers latch onto the stable elements...
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