Curse of the Starving Class

Curse of the Starving Class, a 1976 play by Sam Shepard, maps the darkly comic dysfunction of the Tate family, who grapple with alcoholism, domestic violence, and shattered dreams on their decaying California avocado farm. As the first play in Shepard’s acclaimed “Family Trilogy,” which also includes Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980), Curse blends absurdist humor, religious symbolism, and sociocultural satire into a unique, tragicomic vision of American rural malaise. In 1977, Curse of the Starving Class won the Obie Award for best new American play, and in 1994 it was made into a film starring James Woods and Kathy Bates.

This guide is based on the 1986 Bantam paperback edition of Sam Shepard: Seven Plays.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to substance use, mental illness, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and sexual harassment.

Plot Summary

The play opens in the kitchen of a dilapidated home. Wesley Tate, a young man in his late teens, cleans up the scattered fragments of a screen door, which his father demolished upon returning from a bar the previous night. Meanwhile, Wesley’s sister, Emma, has just started her first period, and Ella, her mother, gives her false, mostly nonsensical advice about menstruation. Soon, Emma furiously argues with her mother about a missing chicken that she needed for a 4-H presentation. Wesley, exasperated with Emma’s shouting, urinates all over her handmade 4-H diagram. After Emma storms off, Ella tells Wesley that she plans to sell their homestead—house, animals, tools, and avocado grove—with help from her “lawyer friend.” Wesley doubts the legality of this, since his father (the co-owner) would have to sign off on it, but Ella insists that it’s all legal. She plans to use the money to go to Europe, leaving her husband with nothing. Wesley says that his father will “kill” her when he finds out.

After Wesley leaves, Emma returns, covered in mud. The family horse threw her, foiling her elaborate dreams of riding off to Mexico. Taylor, Ella’s “lawyer friend,” enters through the broken door and asks Emma to fetch her mother. Wary of him, Emma tells him that her father once “almost killed” a man who got too friendly with her mother. Her father and brother, she claims, have terrible tempers, due to an “explosive” chemical in their blood. As they talk, Wesley enters. He constructs a small pen in the kitchen to hold a sickly lamb that he says has “maggots.” He then confronts Taylor about his dealings with Ella, revealing to Emma that their mother is plotting to sell the house. When Ella comes in, Emma criticizes her and runs off.

Taylor and Ella leave for a business “lunch,” narrowly missing the drunken arrival of Weston, Ella’s husband. After grumbling to himself about the state of the house, Weston fills the refrigerator with a large supply of artichokes, which he bought cheap in the desert, after visiting a piece of land he bought on credit from a slick salesman. The land, he tells Wesley, has turned out to be worthless: “No way to even get water to the goddamn place” (159). Before leaving, he tells his son that he’s been thinking of selling their house to buy some more land in Mexico. He tells Wesley to keep this a secret from his mother.

The next evening, Ella still hasn’t returned from her “lunch” with Taylor. Emma makes new 4-H charts, while Wesley tries to hammer together a new door. The siblings discuss their mother’s relationship with Taylor, Emma speculating that the two have fled to Mexico. Wesley paints a darker scenario: Taylor will have their house torn down, he says, and replaced by soulless, prefab “zombie architecture.” Weston enters, drunker than before. Wesley tells him about Ella’s “business lunch” with Taylor, whose name Weston seems to recognize. Petulantly, he tells his children that he has decided to sell the house, whereupon Emma angrily leaves. With the money, Weston says, he’ll start a new life in Mexico, where no one can “touch” him. Wesley tells him that Ella is also plotting to sell the house, in collusion with Taylor, and Weston screams that he’ll “kill both of them” (169). Wesley tries to talk him down, suggesting that they could stay on and make the avocado farm profitable, but Weston scoffs at the idea. Eventually, Weston falls asleep on the kitchen table.

Ella enters, carrying a big bag of groceries, which she loads into the refrigerator. Wesley learns from her that Taylor sold his father the worthless desert land. Scornfully, he tells his mother that her scheming is too late, since his father already sold the place. He adds that Weston threatened to kill Taylor and her. Breaking down, Ella talks fatalistically about an inescapable “curse” that “goes back to tiny little cells and genes” (174).

Another visitor swaggers onstage: Ellis, the mobster-like owner of a downtown bar called the Alibi Club. Without preamble, he tells Ella that he now owns her house, having bought it from her drunken husband. As proof, he pulls out the “deed,” dutifully signed by Weston, plus the agreed-upon sum of $1,500 dollars. Wesley realizes that his father made this deal to pay off (or evade) loan sharks. Over Ella’s objections, he accepts Ellis’s money, intending to pay off the loan sharks and save his father.

Through the broken door, Taylor arrives with the “final draft” of his contract to buy the house from Ella, sparking a furious argument between him and Ellis, each shouting that the law is on their side. Haughtily, Taylor threatens Wesley and Ella with his “executive” connections but then slips away at the sight of a police officer, who has come with shocking news about Emma: She was arrested for shooting up the Alibi Club with a rifle. Ellis, who owns the Alibi Club, grabs the $1,500 dollars back from Wesley and runs off. Enraged, Wesley pursues him to retrieve the money.

The next day, Weston, shaved, sober, and neatly dressed, folds freshly laundered clothes in a now-tidy kitchen. Excitedly, he tells the lamb, still in its pen, about his youthful days when he used to castrate lambs. Once, seeing a “giant eagle” foraging for food, he threw lamb testes out for it to eat, and its bold, “thunderclap”-like swoops thrilled and inspired him. As he talks, Wesley enters, bloody from his failed attempts to get the money back from Ellis. Cheerily, Weston describes to him the “rebirth” he experienced that morning when he ritualistically “peeled” off his old self by stripping off his clothes, taking hot and cold baths, and walking around the house naked. Glowing with a newfound love of house, home, and family, he fixed the broken door, washed all the laundry, and cooked breakfast for them all. His “animal” sense of flesh-and-blood connection to his children, he says, no longer feels like a burden but like a “good thing.”

Ella returns, haggard-looking, from the jailhouse, where Emma faces numerous charges for her shooting spree at the Alibi Club. Weston makes light of Emma’s crimes, calling her a “ball of fire,” and then coaxes Ella into lying down on the kitchen table, where she soon falls asleep. Meanwhile, Wesley enters, completely naked. Without a word, he picks up the lamb and exits with it. Shortly, he returns in his father’s old clothes and tells Weston that he butchered the lamb.

Horrified by his son’s actions, Weston still clings to his new optimism, loudly insisting that he has been “reborn” and no longer has to answer for his past. However, as his son reminds him, the house is no longer his, and thuggish loan sharks are on his trail. Finally, to save himself, Weston flees the homestead for Mexico. Just after he leaves, Emma enters, having freed herself from jail by sexually propositioning a police officer. Weston tells her he tried his father’s “remedy”—taking hot and cold baths and then walking around nude—but it didn’t work. To get warm, he put on his father’s cast-off clothes, which gave him an uncanny sense of his father taking him over.

Emma tells him that she has wised up about the world and is going off to pursue a life of “crime,” never to return. However, as she starts her mother’s car, it explodes, killing her. Emerson and Slater, two gangsters to whom Weston owes money, gloatingly take responsibility for the bombing. When they leave, Wesley stares at the car’s burning wreckage, transfixed, but Ella, now awake, seems unaware of what has happened. Staring at the butchered lamb, Ella brings up Weston’s story about the eagle that fed on the lamb testes. Wesley, without facing her, helps her narrate the ending of the story, which Weston left out in his telling: The eagle, on one of its majestic dives, inadvertently picked up a cat, and the two fought savagely in midair. Finally, both plummeted to their deaths. As Wesley and Ella stand back-to-back in the kitchen, the lights slowly go down.