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...guess this Sam Shepard fella wants us all t' think he's th' prototype rugged Westerner, th' last cowboy. That's why he's in all those movies, playin' th' big steer with th' bad teeth. N' that's why he writes plays like Curse of the Starving Class...
Curse is one of those plays where all th' characters, even tho they're earthbound Westerners, give monologues that're nice and poetic-like, tho they don't realize it. It's sorta a poetry of restlessness, of loss, of foreboding. Only the characters don't know it, 'cause they're just stringin' words t'gether, fast as they can. Sorta like Jack Kerouac, drivin' thru Colorado like a prophet, n' sayin' t' himself, "Wow!" Sorta like what you'd say if you subconsciously knew someone was gonna sneak up behind you and dump a bucket of shit on your...
...Cause th' decadence n' entropy in Shepard's West are as inevitable as passin' out after you drink eight Pabst Blue Ribbons in 15 minutes. Part of th' reason is that th' characters are all so damn self-destructive. Curse is about a family whose members have what one of them describes as "poison" in th' blood. They're alcoholic, they're violent, they're venal, they're ornery...
Worst of all, they fantasize too much. Ever th' pioneers, Shepard's characters always dream of movin' on t' somewhere else, like Mexico, Alaska or even Europe (ironic, huh?), as if movin' would make them into different people who maybe weren't so self-destructive. Th' members of th' family also dream that things would be better if they either sold their fallow avocado ranch or if they fixed it up. It doesn't hit 'em til th' end that their fantasies are impossible, that they're doomed...
...th' reason they're doomed, besides th' "poison" in their blood, is what one of 'em calls th' "creeping disease" that infects th' whole West. That means these people are poor and stupid. You know they're poor 'cause their fridge is empty, n' you know they're stupid 'cause they open th' fridge door about every three minutes, as if somethin' would have appeared in there since th' last time they looked...