Curse of the Starving Class is a darkly comic exploration of the American family psyche.

The play examines the four members of the Tate family who live on a Californian farm in the 1970s, as they are threatened by the loss of their home to debt and developers. Exploitation wears the mask of "progress" and hardship begins to infect interactions between family members, eroding their capacity for mutual understanding. Tensions rise as the Tates wrestle with their individual and collective identities, the effects of intergenerational trauma and the American Dream that has left them hungry for more.