Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard

First published: 1976, in Angel City and Other Plays

First produced: 1977, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London

Type of plot: Social realism; psychological

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: California

Principal Characters:

• Wesley Tate, a young man
• Emma Tate, his younger sister
• Ella Tate, his mother
• Weston Tate, his father
• Taylor, a land developer
• Ellis, the owner of the Alibi Club, a bar

The Play

Curse of the Starving Class begins with Wesley, in sweatshirt and jeans, tossing pieces of a door into a wheelbarrow. It is morning. Center stage is a table, downstage a refrigerator and stove. Suspended in air, left and right, are faded curtains. Ella, in curlers, wearing a bathrobe, is angry with Weston for having broken the door during the night, but brightens at finding bread and bacon in the refrigerator. As she cooks, Wesley recounts the night’s events, making car sounds as he pushes the wheelbarrow off. Ella talks about menstruation as Emma, who is having her first period, enters. Wearing a 4-H Club uniform, Emma carries charts illustrating how to cut up a chicken. Finding the chicken she butchered for her demonstration gone, she storms off. While Ella eats her breakfast, Wesley urinates on Emma’s charts. Returning, Emma asks, “What kind of a family is this?”

The play presents a seemingly bizarre family and a series of events involving the sale of its home, but actually pointing to the disintegration of the family. The Tates live on a farm where they formerly raised sheep and grew avocados. Weston, once a pilot, is now an alcoholic heavily in debt. Taylor, a land developer, is courting Ella. The refrigerator is the focal point of the action; each member of the family is obsessed with its emptiness. Emma runs away, only to return covered with mud, thrown by her horse. Taylor arrives for his luncheon date with Ella; the children treat him rudely. Wesley sets up a folding enclosure and puts a sick lamb inside. Ella and Taylor leave together, and Emma runs off again.

Wesley exits at the sounds of his father’s approach. Weston, slightly drunk, is a big man; he wears baggy pants, tennis shoes, an overcoat, and a baseball cap. Addressing the lamb, he sets a duffel and a grocery bag on the table. Wesley returns as Weston fills the refrigerator with artichokes he bought in the desert. Property he had there has proved worthless, so he decides to sell the family’s home. Telling Wesley how to treat the maggot-infested lamb, Weston dumps his laundry from the duffel onto the table for Ella to wash.

Act 2 begins with the sounds of hammering. The lights come up on Wesley, building a new door, and Emma, in a Western shirt, jodhpurs, and riding boots, making new charts for her demonstration. The laundry is still on the table; a pot of artichokes boils on the stove. It is the next day. Ella has not returned from her meeting with Taylor. Weston stumbles in, drunker than before, announcing that he has sold the house to Ellis. Emma walks out. Swearing he will kill Taylor and Ella, Weston staggers against the table and falls asleep on top of it.

Ella returns with groceries. Throwing the artichokes out, she fills the refrigerator. Wesley realizes that it was Taylor who sold Weston the desert property just as Ellis arrives with fifteen hundred dollars for the house, the exact amount Weston owes to gangsters. Ella and Ellis argue, Ellis shows her the deed Weston gave him, and Taylor arrives to settle his deal with Ella. Finally, highway patrolman Malcolm appears with the news that Emma, having shot up the Alibi Club, is in jail. Taylor departs surreptitiously; Ellis grabs his money from Wesley and rushes off, with Wesley in pursuit. Malcolm agrees to wait for Ella at the station. Alone, Ella stares at Weston asleep on the table; he sits up, they look at each other, she runs off, and he lurches toward the refrigerator, kicking artichokes out of his way.

The lamb is heard before the lights come up on act 3. Clean laundry is stacked on the table; the room has been swept. Weston, sober, neatly dressed, folds laundry while talking to the lamb. He remembers a time he was castrating sheep and appeased an eagle by throwing testicles up on a tin roof where the bird could get them. Wesley returns, bloodied by Ellis. Weston explains his new outlook: He took a bath, walked around the place naked, cleaned everything, ate a good breakfast, and decided to fix things up. He advises Wesley to do the same.

Ella returns from jail, exhausted, to find Weston cooking breakfast for Wesley. She and Weston argue heatedly. Pushing the clothes to the floor, she falls asleep on the table. Wesley wanders in, dazed and naked, wet from his bath. He looks at his parents; they do not notice him, and he leaves with the lamb. When he returns, he is wearing Weston’s overcoat, tennis shoes, and baseball cap, and he says that he butchered the lamb for food. He begins eating everything in the refrigerator. Wesley assures his father that the gang will get him, and Weston takes off for Mexico. Having escaped jail by having sex with Officer Malcolm, Emma has decided to become a criminal. Ella sits up and screams, and Emma departs.

An enormous explosion is heard. Emerson, a hit man, enters giggling, followed by his partner Slater, carrying the skinned lamb carcass. They have blown up Weston’s car, unaware that Emma was inside. Ella mistakenly calls Wesley Weston. Emerson and Slater warn him to pay up. Wesley protests feebly. Slater drops the lamb inside the fence; laughing, the two men leave, issuing another warning. Ella looks at the carcass, remembering Weston’s story of the eagle. Wesley finishes the story, how a big cat climbed onto the roof and began fighting with the eagle. The eagle carried the cat away, and they fought until both came crashing down. The play ends as Wesley, his back to his mother, concludes the story. Ella stares at the lamb.

Dramatic Devices

The use of the artichokes in Curse of the Starving Class suggests both the realistic and mythic aspects of Shepard’s dramatic strategy. They are realistic as stage properties, but the sheer quantity Weston brings home is obsessive, imparting a meaning beyond their food value. So many artichokes seem bizarre in a household where there is never enough to eat. The set similarly incorporates both realistic and mythic elements. The play’s action demands a working refrigerator and a working stove, yet there are no walls to define the kitchen, and the “ruffled, red-checked curtains” that are “suspended in midair” do little to confirm a concrete reality.

The property requirements suggest a realistic, if not a naturalistic play. Among other things, in act 1, Sam Shepard calls for the table and chairs, the refrigerator and stove, the remains of the broken door, the wheelbarrow, the duffel, the bag full of artichokes, and the live lamb and the collapsible pen. At the end of the play, the skinned lamb carcass symbolically suggests the sacrifice of Wesley, or perhaps Emma, to a malevolent force. Shepard makes similar realistic and mythic use of costumes; the clothes in which Weston is first seen also “fit” Wesley.

The conventions of dialogue in the play again present this mixture. Acts 1 and 2 both begin with characters engaged in simple question-and-answer conversations which serve to provide expository information necessary to an understanding of what has occurred before the start of the play or between the acts. On the other hand, all the members of the family, except for Ella, are given long monologues which are almost soliloquies. In act 1, while Ella prepares her breakfast, Wesley has a long speech in which he recounts his sense of life while lying in bed, not simply on this night but also on many other nights. In an eerie way he is speaking neither to his mother nor directly to the audience; instead, the audience is allowed to hear his thought processes. When he pushes the wheelbarrow off, Ella begins a conversation about menstruation that seems directed at another person, but no one is there. When Emma enters, she joins in that conversation, and Shepard creates the sense that this conversation has been going on for some time. Later, when Weston enters and finds only the lamb at home, he naturally begins a conversation.

Emma, by way of contrast, often shouts her lines from offstage. She appears to be the most bizarre character in the play, yet is also the most “normal” member of the family. She participates in 4-H, she is an excellent student, and she wants to make something of herself. The dramatic means Shepard uses to present her underlines the theme of the play, the failure of communication, the failure of love, the failure of these individuals to nurture their young. Like so much else in Curse of the Starving Class, she is presented realistically, but there is a mythic quality to her character.

Critical Context

Curse of the Starving Class, an Obie Award winner in 1977, has generally been taken to mark a change in Sam Shepard’s writing for the theater. The first of his plays to move toward a realistic presentation of family life, it was followed by a series of works with similar concerns: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child (pr. 1978, pb. 1979) and True West (pr. 1980, pb. 1981), Fool for Love (pr., pb. 1983), and A Lie of the Mind (pr. 1985, pb. 1986). In all these plays, there is a concern for realistic detail, but at the same time there is the mythic quality that marked Shepard’s earlier work. Interestingly, characters resembling those who are only minor in Curse of the Starving Class—the hit men, Emerson and Slater, or Ellis, the owner of the Alibi Club—play more prominent roles in plays such as The Tooth of Crime (pr. 1972, pb. 1974) and Geography of a Horse Dreamer (pr., pb. 1974). However, if Shepard has lost some of the avant-garde quality of his earlier work, he retains his ongoing concern with American themes and myths.

With Curse of the Starving Class and the plays that follow it, Shepard proved himself a major figure in the American theater. These plays place him in one of the major traditions of American drama. Seen in the context of the American family as it is presented in such plays as George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You (pr. 1936) or Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (pr. 1941), the Tates hardly seem bizarre at all. Early reviewers noted the resemblance of Curse of the Starving Class to Jack Kirkland’s Great Depression hit Tobacco Road (pr. 1933). Shepard’s characters are portrayed with a seriousness and an ironic humor characteristic of many American plays. Moreover, the structure of family life in the United States is a major concern in the work of playwrights as diverse as Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee. To remark upon such similarities of tradition is to observe that Sam Shepard is a playwright squarely in the American vein.

Sources for Further Study

Cohn, Ruby. “The Word Is My Shepard.” In New American Dramatists, 1960-1980. New York: Grove, 1982.

DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Kauffmann, Stanley. “What Price Freedom?” The New Republic 178 (April 8, 1978): 24-25.

King, Kimball. Sam Shepard: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988.

Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1981.

Oumano, Ellen. Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

VerMeulen, Michael. “Sam Shepard: Yes, Yes, Yes.” Esquire 93 (February, 1980): 79-86.