[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 its course….

I would like to report that the play works better and more creatively on the symbolic level, but here the imagery tends to excess. The empty refrigerator that the characters stare into with ritual regularity speaks not only of physical, but of emotional, cultural, and moral starvation as well. And Weston's parable of the eagle swooping down to gather up the sheep's testicles, and later latching onto and refusing to let go of the cat which claws at and devours it suggests the complex way in which the victim can become the predator. This family eats one another up as surely as society does. (p. 409)

Yet for all its faults, the play has a certain blunt force and sincerity, and appears better in retrospect than it did in the initial viewing. It makes one thing tantalizingly clear: more and more, American dramatists—perhaps most prominently the two Millers, Arthur in almost all of his plays and Jason in That Championship Season—have come to associate the distortion and death of the American dream with the failure of fathers, from some warped notion of masculinity, to provide emotional sustenance for their families. Hung up on money, power, success, they are afraid or unable to say, let alone show, that they love. "Where have all the fathers gone?" Shepard shouts with all the rest. (p. 410)