Curse of the Starving Class | Themes

Curse of the Starving Class Themes

The Disappearing Frontier

Shepard's work, from his first play Cowboys to his most recent scripts, is suffused with images of cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers. When he was asked by a Theatre Quarterly interviewer in 1974 why he wrote about cowboys, Shepard replied:

Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about sixteen or seventeen, who decided they didn't want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with that way of life, and took on this immense country, and didn't have any real rules.

Shepard's fascination with images from the Western frontier also derives from his sense that something great and important in the American character has disappeared.

In Curse of the Starving Class, the unnamed family on which the play centers are all affected by their unidentifiable sensation that a frontier has disappeared. They live in southern California, a place that was initially a...
(read more)