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Theater: Bad Blood

CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS by Sam Shepard

What distinguishes Sam Shepard from a score of promising and prolific young U.S. dramatists is that he is our most persistent social critic. Not that he indulges in the finger pointing that characterizes post-Watergate morality. Always in sorrow and never in anger, he exposes the dry rot that has eroded the faith and commitment of Americans to the triple pillars of society—God, family and country. His style varies from surrealistic to naturalistic to pop, and all of his plays contain an unsettling mixture of wild...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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