Curse of the Starving Class

The setting is a farmhouse somewhere in the American West, inhabited by a family who have enough to eat, but not enough more to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father is a drunk; the mother a frowzy slattern; the daughter precocious beyond her years; and the son a deranged idealist who wants something better but has no clear idea of how to attain it. The action is filled with changes and counter-changes as the family decides to sell the house to raise money; the mother talks of running off to Europe or Mexico but ends up asleep on the kitchen table; the father sobers up and tries to take control; the daughter is blown up in the family car; and the son is brutalized and bloodied by the evil forces besetting them. In the end of the play its people become a metaphor for the underside of American life—the benighted innocents forever pursuing a diminished dream and the illusion of fulfillment that remains ever beyond their reach.