6 - Repetition and regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child

Summary

In a 1988 interview, Sam Shepard commented on the centrality of the notion of family and heredity to his thought: “What doesn't have to do with family? There isn't anything, you know what I mean? Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with family. We all come out of each other - everyone is born out of a mother and a father, and you go on to be a father. It's an endless cycle.” Whether critics consider Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978) the first two parts of a “family trilogy” completed by True West (1980), or the first two movements in a quintet - those three works plus Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) - they all agree that these two plays mark a turning point to a more realistic, perhaps somewhat O'Neillian dramaturgy. Yet, as Charles R. Lyons insists, it is a realism to which Shepard attaches his own original signature by ironically undercutting it: “Shepard took up another highly conventionalized aesthetic form - dramatic realism - and reconfigured its typical structure to accommodate the more open, fluid conventions of his writing . . . this shift forms another 'appropriation': Shepard's borrowing of the conventions of dramatic realism, theatrical schemes which, by this point, were also 'popular' although decidedly not ideologically radical.”