In the first Act of Curse of the Starving Class, we are introduced to the dysfunctional, middle class family of Ella and Weston and their children Wesley and Emma. The curtains open on a mismatched, faded kitchen with the door lying in pieces on the ground, and a refrigerator downstage left. Ella and her son Wesley argue over Wesley cleaning up the door, and it becomes apparent that Weston, Ella's husband and Wesley's father, drunkenly knocked the door down the previous night after Ella locked him out. Wesley has a HUGE monologue about his experience of the argument, listening from his bedroom:
"I could feel the space around me like a big, black world. I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid. Afraid of sound. Tense. Like any second something could invade me. Some foreigner. Something undescribable. Then I heard the Packard coming up the hill. From a mile off I could tell it was the Packard by the sound of the valves."
Wesley exits, leaving Ella onstage alone to seamlessly transition into what becomes a talk with her daughter Emma about menstruation, hospital sanitation, and fear of germs. Emma tells her mother about her 4-H project, which is a demonstration of how to cut up a frying chicken. No really, what?? She even has charts and posters.
Things become really interesting, and pretty weirdly funny, when Emma discovers that her chicken is missing from the fridge and deduces that her mother must have taken it without asking. Ella tells her to go outside if she wants to yell, which Emma does, and her offstage voice ranting about her missing chicken is pretty hysterical. She eventually shouts, in response to her mother's defense that she had been "starving", that they are not part of the starving class, and that her mother is a spoiled brat. By the way, Ella has been eating bacon and toast the entire time, and I get the feeling that food is going to be a central part of this story about a middle class family who is definitely hungry for meaning in their lives, and who tends to fill that void with food.
Wesley then re-enters to see what all the fuss is about and then... pees on his sister's charts? "I'm opening up new possibilities for her," he explains. "Now she'll have to do something else. It could change her whole direction in life."
Ella confides to her son that she is planning to sell their house and their land without Weston's consent and then take her children and herself to Europe. Stereotypical American middle-class dream. Wesley expresses no interest in going to Europe, and Ella wonders why he is not sensitive like his grandfather was, and draws a strange parallel to their similarly circumcised penises. Say what, incestual genital knowledge?
Ella confesses that she has a "lawyer friend" with whom she has already worked out how to sell the house. Wesley grows angry, telling her that people live in this house and take care of it, which Ella obviously disagrees with. Wesley exits to go "feed the sheep." Then his offstage voice shouts back at Ella, and we have this interchange:
Wesley's Voice: HE'S GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN HE FINDS OUT!
Ella: HE'S NOT GOING TO FIND OUT! (pause) THE ONLY PERSON HE'S GOING TO KILL IS HIMSELF!
This is starting to remind me of August: Osage County.
Emma returns after being thrown off and dragged behind the horse she was planning to run away on. She shares with her mother her dreams of running away to Mexico, to work on fishing boats and as a mechanic and as a short order cook and as a novelist. She and her mother exhibit the dysfunctionality and misunderstandings that make up their relationship during the ensuing conversation:
ELLA: What are you dreaming for?
EMMA: I'm not dreaming now. I was dreaming then. Right up to the point when I got the halter on. Then as soon as he took off I stopped. I stopped dreaming and saw myself being dragged through the mud.
ELLA: Go change your clothes.
EMMA: Stop saying that over and over as though by saying it you relieve yourself of responsibility.
ELLA: I can't even follow the way you talk to me anymore.
EMMA: That's good.
ELLA: Why is that good?
EMMA: Because if you could then that would mean that you understand me.
Ella exits, and before Taylor, her "lawyer friend" arrives, Emma opens the refrigerator and announces to it that they are not poor, you know, so it really doesn't have any business being empty.
Emma clearly does not take to Taylor, and the awkward and hostile conversation that follows demonstrates Emma's pride in being middle class and in her father and that she does not take kindly to strangers attempting to turn her family's life upside down. Wesley enters with a fence and places a sheep within it in the middle of the stage, and also clearly does not want Taylor around.
After Ella and Taylor leave on a 'business meeting,' Weston returns home with a bag of laundry and a bag of artichokes to fill the empty refrigerator. He and Wesley speak, and Weston reveals that he also has been planning to sell the house behind his spouse's back. Rather than Europe, he wants to move to Mexico.
This act ends with concern over the lamb in the middle of the kitchen, who is revealed to have maggots.
"Can't afford to lose any lambs," Weston says. "Only had but two sets a' twins this year, didn't we?"
"Three," Wesley replies.
"Well, three then," Weston concedes. "It's not much."
What stood out to me in this act:
-the refrigerator
-how food is equated with wealth, and how much you eat or don't eat is in direct correlation to how wealthy you view yourself
-the lamb is brought into the house and placed in a central position on the stage. a LIVE lamb.
-both Ella and Weston want to sell the house and start over somewhere new; interestingly, Ella believes she will be happy in Europe, Weston in Mexico
-Emma is referred to as "spoiled" because of her father by both Ella and Wesley
-the name similarities
-Ella's rude, brash, scathing, but intelligent conversation with Taylor, the outsider
-is Taylor the only sane character? (audience seeing the family through the outsiders eyes)
-the offstage character vs. onstage character screaming at each other: does anyone yell at anyone else when both characters are onstage? (the offstage voice is a characteristic of Shepard's, repeated often in Buried Child)
-Ella calls the menstrual cycle a "curse"
-Weston arrives in the last few minutes of the scene, already drunk
Themes/What do I think this play is about:
-the hunger of middle-class American families for something more, their inability to feed that hunger through relationships with each other because no one COMMUNICATES in an understandable way
No comments:
Post a Comment