Curse of the Starving Class | The Father, the Son, and The Holy Ghostly
In the following essay, the author discusses
Shepard’s creation of an ‘‘intricate network’’ of
elements to create a ‘‘mythic subtext’’ of forces
infecting the lives of his characters.
In Curse of the Starving Class, it is not just the
father’s ghost who refuses to die but also a family
curse, an inherited predisposition toward violence, a
‘‘nitroglycerine of the blood’’ that flows through
the son’s veins as it does through the father’s. Like
the unseen forces at work on Shepard’s earlier
characters, this blood curse, transmitted from generation
to generation by ‘‘tiny cells and genes,’’ is a
powerful yet invisible force, imposing itself upon
the characters in the play without their...
[The entire page is 3805 words long]
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