Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard, Act 2

Act Two opens with siblings Emma and Wesley hard at work on tasks that are interestingly, stereotypically gender appropriate: Emma is recreating her charts on how to properly cut a frying chicken (since her brother pissed on them in the last act), and Wesley is rebuilding the door that his father broke down. Their conversation quickly turns to an issue of thematic importance: restlessness and dissatisfaction in heartland America.

EMMA: She's after more than that.
WESLEY: More than what?
EMMA: Money. She's after esteem.
WESLEY: With Taylor?
EMMA: Yeah. She sees him as an easy ticket. She doesn't want to be stuck out here in the boonies all her life.

Emma monologues (note to self to keep this one in mind for the future) again about her dreams of being a mechanic in Mexico. She dreams of swindling her mother and the lawyer, Taylor, out of money when their car hypothetically breaks down.

Wesley believes that Taylor wants to buy the house and sell it to a land development agency so they can turn it into "a zombie city... Zombie architecture, owned by invisible zombies, built by zombies for the use and convenience of all other zombies."

"So what?" Emma asks.
"So it means more than losing a house," Wesley answers. "It means losing a country."

Interestingly, we learn that Wesley, who has been the most upset about the prospect of selling the house and moving out, does not plan to stick around very long anyway. He has no intention of going to Europe like his mother or Mexico like his father and sister, however; he wants to go to Alaska. "It's full of possibilities. It's undiscovered."

Unfortunately, Weston returns, even drunker than he was before, and if it wasn't made clear in the last act, it certainly become so now that Emma is his preferred child, while Wesley is a nuisance and a spy.

The conversation between Weston and Wesley about Weston's poisoned outlook and about how he inherited the poison from his father because he never truly saw it until it had already taken up residence inside him, is a theme that is definitely found in much of Shepard's works, such as Buried Child and True West.

Weston threatens to kill his wife and Taylor and the man who took advantage of him by selling him a piece of desert in Mexico. Clearly, Weston believes that his animalistic rage and murderous instincts are part of his survival skills and borne of his class status.

"He [Taylor] doesn't know what he's dealing with....He's not counting on what's in my blood. He doesn't realize the explosiveness. We don't belong to the same class. He doesn't realize that. He's not counting on that. He's counting on me to use my reason. To talk things out. To have a conversation. To go out and have a business lunch and talk things over. He's not counting on murder. Murder's the farthest thing from his mind."

Weston passes out on the kitchen table and Ella finally returns with a bag of groceries. Wesley again claims that he is not moving out of the house and tells Ella that Weston has already sold the house. Ella refuses to believe him, and Wesley warns her that Weston is going to kill Taylor, and then kill her. There is a pause, and then:

"Do you know what this is?" Ella asks. "It's a curse. I can feel it. It's invisible but it's there....And it goes back. Deep. It goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes. To atoms. To tiny little swimming things making up their minds without us. Plotting in the womb. Before that even. In the air. We're surrounded with it. It's bigger than government even. It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down, and then pass it down again. It goes on and on like that without us."

The human dilemma: we are incredibly complex machines dependent on the internal organs that chug along day and night, but we do not truly understand ourselves. How do our hearts keep beating, without us telling them to? Are we truly ourselves, and what are we if we are not our bodies? If we have no control over the molecules and cells that are managing our bodily functions every minute, every second? How do we ever get rid of this feeling of insignificance, of misunderstanding, if we are not even in control of our own existences? If we cannot keep from inheriting or passing on our flaws, physical, psychological, emotional? What is family? Merely external extensions of our own genetic makeup, ruled by the tiny machines that have their own minds and keep us running without our knowledge, our understanding, or our consent?

Ellis, the owner of the bar that Weston frequents, "the Alibi Club", enters. He brings $1500 and the news that Weston has signed the deed to the house over to him. He also explains that Weston has serious debts that he needs to pay off, and that Ellis is planning on renovating the house into a steak restaurant. Taylor enters with the final draft for Ella to sign, arguing that Weston is not psychologically fit to sell the house and therefore will not be held accountable for his actions in a court of law. Wesley begins putting two and two together, and asks Taylor if the same can be true for his father's buying actions as well as selling. Taylor's evasive answer is an indication that it was he who sold Weston the piece of land in the desert in a shoddy business deal taking advantage of Weston's drunken and impulsive state.

Taylor's monologue, which is in response to the intimidation and non-responsiveness of the family, is indicative of Shepard's own suspicious view of how consumerism and corporations are shaping the future of the U.S.

"You may not realize it, but there's corporations behind me! Executive management! People of influence. People with ambition who realize the importance of investing in the future. Of building this country up, not tearing it down. You people carry on as though the whole world revolved around your petty little existence. As though everything was holding its breath, waiting for your next move. Well, it's not like that! Nobody's waiting! Everything's going forward! Everything's going ahead without you! The wheels are in motion. There's nothing you can do to turn it back. The only thing you can do is cooperate. To play ball. To become part of us. To invest in the future of this great land. Because if you don't, you'll all be left behind."

Shepard is echoing a great fear of the lower and middle classes, that they will be left behind as the upper and business classes force them to fall in line with their views for the future. He also portrays Taylor, the embodiment of the corporate world, as a potentially shady character, since Wesley believes that Taylor scammed his father and because Taylor becomes nervous when Sergeant Malcolm enters.

Speaking of which... remember when Emma stormed offstage after Weston revealed that he had sold the house to the owner of the Alibi Club? And he and Wesley made crude, sexist comments about her starting her period? Yeah, she left to go RIDE HER HORSE INTO THE ALIBI CLUB AND SHOOT HOLES IN IT WITH ONE OF WESTON'S RIFLES.

Hell yeah, this girl is badass!

So Sergeant Malcolm comes in to see what Ella wants to do about her daughter, Ellis goes crazy and takes the money back, saying that the deal is off when he hears that his bar has been shot to pieces, and Taylor makes a slick getaway, creeping out the front door. Wesley runs after Ellis to get the money back, and Ella agrees to drive down to city hall to sign an arraignment that will mean her daughter will have to stay in juvenile court.

The act ends with Weston (finally) waking up with a start, and Ella running out of the house. Weston looks around and moves to the refrigerator. The lights go down with him staring in the open fridge.

Important moments, themes, monologues:
-gender roles
-Emma's monologue about being a mechanic and swindling her mom out of money
-Wesley's concern about the 'zombie-fication' of the U.S. to corporations ("It means more than losing a house. It means losing a country."
-Wesley want to go to Alaska, an undiscovered land that is still, interestingly, part of the U.S.
-Weston's pride in the "explosiveness" in his blood, in the rage that will fuel him to act before thinking, before rationalizing, before communicating
-both parents are trying to double-cross each other
-Taylor's monologue about progress and that those who fight it will be left behind
-Emma's offstage action of shooting the Alibi Club through with bullets!!!

What are we looking for when, in our restlessness or dissatisfaction, we go home and open the refrigerator? Particularly when we are not hungry?

Curse of the Starving Class by Sam Shepard, Act 1

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