Curse of the Starving Class

In Curse of the Starving Class, “wooden debris, torn screen, etc.” from “a broken door” are among the first objects illuminated onstage (135). In the play’s timeline, the door has only recently been destroyed, but the timeless damage it connotes—of a broken home, both literally and figuratively—sets the stage for what follows. Because the kitchen is the play’s sole setting, the shattered door, in its various stages of disrepair, is always within view, a gaping wound in the family’s domestic life that the Tates only sporadically acknowledge. Weston, the Tate patriarch, smashed the door in one of his drunken rampages, and its scattered debris symbolizes his long wake of destruction—most recently, his extravagant spending, which put the family deep into debt. His history of callous excess left his family vulnerable, in every sense, to outside threats, such as the con man Taylor and the gangsters Emerson and Slater, all of whom enter the house through the broken door.

In addition, the splintered door symbolizes the deep fissures within the family, whose demoralized members have begun to plot against and pilfer from each other. Over the play’s brief action, Ella steals her daughter’s chicken; Ella steals her mother’s money and tries to steal the family car; Weston and Ella each collude with outsiders to steal the family farm; and even Wesley, the most honest of the Tates, destroys his sister’s 4-H chart by urinating on it.