Curse of the Starving Class

The patriarch of the dysfunctional Tate family and the play’s prime mover, Weston, is an almost comic embodiment of failure as a husband, father, farmer, and businessman. Weston lives with his wife and two children on a failing avocado farm in an agriculturally depressed Western state (presumably California) and doesn’t receive much respect from his family: His daughter regards him as “disgusting,” and his wife calls him a “pathetic” man who “couldn’t sell a shoestring” (173). A slovenly spendthrift, he’s a mostly absentee parent and has an alcohol addiction. Weston has largely ignored his family’s emotional needs, instead terrorizing them during his drunken rages and plunging them into debt through foolhardy purchases, sometimes funded by thuggish loan sharks. A “very big,” middle-aged man who dresses shabbily in baggy pants, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap, Weston functions mostly as a grotesquely comic character, though his behavior has a distinctly tragic undertow. For a large part of the play, Weston is asleep onstage, which hints at his casual neglect of his family and his general lack of emotional presence; before the play even begins, he shows his irresponsibility by demolishing the door of the family house. Later, he reveals that he was secretly plotting to sell the house to outsiders for his own financial gain.