Review of: August: Osage County

Generations ago, the dysfunctional in a dysfunctional family meant something. Today, to be a functional family is the exception, ergo, the dysfunctional family is now considered functional and the functional of yesteryear is something unheard of. It’s possible that the sharp drop-off in soap opera viewing can be reflected in the above formula. Corruption, adulterous affairs, May-December romances, secretive parentage, incest – you name it – don’t carry the weight in the melodramas that riveted housewives, teenage girls and college co-eds as they once did. The ability to shock these days takes some doing. In his play August: Osage County, Tracy Letts must raise the bar of dysfunction to evoke the nightmare that’s become the American Dream. He sets his domestic drama in Oklahoma – a state redolent of the country’s history. From one perspective you could look at this panhandle land as the center of the United States from which radiates all that went wrong in the past century and a half – war, the eradication of Native Americans, dustbowl poverty, overnight oil magnate millionaires (and everything that that entails) and Bible Belt creationism. From several regions of the country, three generations of the Weston family re-unite when the family patriarch, Beverly, a poet and a retired professor from the University of Oklahoma, disappears. What follows is a week of old wounds blistering anew and astounding revelations that might make writers of soap operas blush.

I do not want to reveal too much but one could interpret Beverly’s desire to be finished with his life as a necessary step to escape hell on earth. Disappointed with his children for various reasons and indirectly responsible for his wife’s drug-addled and venomous condition who could blame him? Well certainly his relatives including some in-laws. However, one of Mr. Letts’ points is that each individual must take responsibility for their own problems. Youngest daughter, Karen, is a cipher with pretensions that land her in relationships anything but healthy. Nothing in her new age dictionary is going to fill the void of having been ignored. Middle daughter, Ivy, is still living near to the homestead at the age of 40+ and is in love with her cousin. The cousin, Little Charles, is considered to be just shy of retarded when in fact he’s merely brow-beaten by his mother, Mattie Fae, who is sister to Beverly’s wife, Violet. Eldest daughter, Barbara, is in a dead marriage and fallen far short of her intellectual potential. Her husband, Bill, has been in a long love affair and is ready for divorce, while Bill’s and Barbara’s young daughter is on her way to being addicted to pot. It is matriarch Violet who generates the family woes and the principal culprit for inflicting the original wounds that keep her daughters at bay. It’s not for nothing that she suffers from cancer of the mouth literally and figuratively as she spews forth what she believes to be the ugly truths of her American nuclear family. Addicted to pain killers and periodically in a doped up haze, we discover that her condition is not new to her. Therefore, we must ask ourselves are the truths that she reveals reliable or are they inventions, inadvertent or otherwise.

Mr. Letts’ characters are individuals each with their own unique voice yet all possessing a familial vernacular. That accomplishment is a major talent in and of itself. Moving his play along from quiet tete-a-tetes through transitional explorations and then to set-pieces (a family dinner scene as a piece de resistance) and back again, Mr. Letts’ writing never feels forced and the surprises in retrospect make perfect sense. Rarely have I heard a Broadway audience en masse gasp or hoot as one revelation after another stumble upon each other. Could this long three-acter use some editing? A little here and there but who’s complaining? Mr. Letts achieves melting pot literature. Think O’Neill, Mamet, Ibsen, Chekhov, Inge, Camus, Fugard and more rolling across the stage. One can’t help but think of the ‘medicated’ Mary Tyrone and of course those Russian three sisters who long to escape their provincial prison, only this time the weepy despair of the circumstances in reverse and heads getting bashed instead..

The production under Anna D. Shapiro’s forceful direction is near to perfect with a couple of performances not exactly hitting their mark, but that they get close is good enough. Those that do hit the mark with bull’s eyes certainly include Deanna Dunagan who makes Violet as dangerous, and yet as fragile as a steamed crab; Rondi Reed as her dissatisfied, second-banana sister obviously cut from the same cloth; Charlie Aiken as Matti Fae’s good-natured, martyr-like husband; Brian Kerwin as an outsider along for the ride; Sally Murphy as the near-to-home daughter who can’t help needing family, even one as perverse as this one; and my favorite, Amy Morton as the eldest daughter, Barbara. Ms. Morton gives Barbara the kind of common sense attitude that you find in at least one member of every extended family while simultaneously giving her the power necessary for the outsized emotions the script calls for. You will never forget her second act closing line.

A final image on Todd Rosenthal’s three-tiered modern Gothic set, at times eerily shadowed by Ann G. Wrightson’s lighting, has the newly acquired nurse/housekeeper/cook, a local Native American, sitting in her attic room atop the Weston home built on the land once owned by her ancestors. She looks forlorn and dismayed by what is occurring beneath her and there is a moment when you think, like her, what the hell has become of the invaders’ new frontier.

I should note that I write this review six months after seeing the production which should indicate that August: Osage County has amazing staying power. I believe it is going to be a classic.

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