The Decay of Social Relations in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child

Abstract

The American playwright Sam Shepard chose the family as a nucleus for many of his plays. He depicts the American reality and mixes it with absurdity and myth. The families in his plays are spoiled and deformed units. Their members are failed and ruined American men and women tied by decayed immoral relations. This rotten deformed image is seen as a mirror to reflect the reality of the American society. This paper studies the decayed relations in two plays Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child.