Curse of the Starving Class

Lights come up on a plainly furnished kitchen with mismatched chairs and faded curtains. On the floor are fragments of a broken door (pieces of wood, a torn screen). Wesley, a young man in jeans and cowboy boots, diligently gathers the debris and puts it in a wheelbarrow. Ella, his mother, enters in a bathrobe, as if having just woken up. She tells him that his father broke the door the previous night in a drunken rage when he found it locked upon returning home from the bars. She admits that she locked the door and called the police when she heard it being broken down. She claims she didn’t know who was breaking in, but Wesley contradicts this, saying he could hear the two of them arguing. He says she shouldn’t have called the cops on his father because the presence of police in the house made him feel as if the family was in “trouble.”

As Ella cooks breakfast, Wesley delivers a long monologue, seemingly to himself, about the previous night: the nocturnal sounds and smells, and how he could feel “the presence” of all the people and animals outside, whether sleeping or awake. Soon, his thoughts become nervous and fearful, as if he were an “enemy” about to be invaded.