Reviewed by Judy Richter
After winning the 2008 Pulitzer
Prize for drama and five Tony Awards, including Best Play, Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," is on a national tour
that has landed in San Francisco. Audiences here are familiar with his work
mainly through "Killer Joe" in a Marin Theatre Company production that proved so
popular, it transferred to San Francisco as a commercial production at the Magic
Theatre.
The
characters of "August: Osage County" are several social and
intellectual steps above the trailer trash of "Killer Joe." They use
words rather than physical violence as their weapons, but the emotional toll is
no less damaging.
One
of the factors that make "August" so intriguing is that all 13
characters are interesting. One can easily talk about each one's actions and
motivations as they relate to the others. Spread over three acts and running
more than three hours, "August" chronicles a dysfunctional family's
disintegration step by painful step, yet leavens the tragic with comic moments.
The
action takes place in the Weston family home (three-level set by Todd
Rosenthal with
lighting by Ann G. Wrightson, costumes by Ana Kuzmanic and sound by Richard Woodbury), outside Pawhuska, Okla., about
60 miles northwest of Tulsa. It opens with the family patriarch Beverly Weston
(John DeVries),
delivering a long, alcohol-fueled monologue to Johnna Montevata (DeLanna
Studi), a young
Cheyenne Indian woman whom he is hiring as a housekeeper and possible caretaker
to his wife, Violet (Estelle Parsons), who, among other problems, has mouth cancer. Beverly, a
retired college teacher and poet, talks about the compromises he and Violet
have made -- he with his drinking, she with her addiction to prescription
drugs. He also talks of T.S. Eliot and quotes from "The Wasteland."
A
few days later, Beverly has disappeared, prompting a gathering of several
family members: middle daughter Ivy (Angelica Torn), a mousy college teacher who
lives nearby; Violet's sharp-tongued sister, Mattie Fae Aiken (Libby George), and her husband, Charlie (Paul
Vincent O'Connor),
who also live fairly close; and eldest daughter Barbara Fordham (Shannon
Cochran), who
teaches college in Boulder, Colo.; along with her husband, Bill (Jeff Still), also a college teacher; and
their 14-year-old daughter, Jean (Emily Kinney). We soon learn that Barbara and
Bill are separated because he's sleeping with one of his students. The arrival
of the sheriff, Deon Gilbeau (Marcus Nelson), ends their speculation about
what has happened to Beverly. He has committed suicide by drowning.
Act
2 takes place after Beverly's funeral, when everyone goes to the family
homestead for dinner. By then, the group has been joined by the youngest Weston
daughter, Karen (Amy Warren), a Realtor in Florida; her fiance, Steve Heidebrecht (Laurence
Lau), an oily
businessman; and Mattie Fae and Charlie's adult son, Little Charles (Stephen
Riley Key). The
gathering at dinner and later in the evening erupts into a series of angry
confrontations and even physical fights as one character after another digs
deep into long-festering emotional wounds and long-kept secrets.
By
Act 3, almost everyone has gone home in a huff, perhaps never to return. Only
Barbara remains, but as was evident in Act 2, she's becoming just as shrewish
as her mother and just as heavy a drinker as her father. She apparently wants
to help Violet, but Violet's cruel tongue eventually drives her away, too,
leaving only the steady, apparently unflappable Johnna there to comfort the
confused and now self-pitying Violet with the penultimate lines from "The
Wasteland": "This is the way the world ends." It's up to the
audience to fill in the last line, "Not with a bang, but a whimper."
Among
the 13 characters, only five seem to be decent rather than vicious. Besides
Johnna, they're the sheriff; the intellectually slow but innately sweet Little
Charles; Ivy, who somehow survives and finally escapes with Little Charles; and
the Charlie, who tries to be a peacemaker but who finally stands up to his
wife, Mattie Fae, and insists that she not belittle Little Charles.
Now,
as if addiction and emotional cruelty weren't enough, Letts adds other issues
such as incest, adultery and pedophilia to the mix. Despite all the plot twists
and turns, though, the story is easy to follow. A family tree in the program
helps the audience sort everyone out before becoming well acquainted with them.
Anna
D. Shapiro, who
won a Tony for directing the original production, keeps the action flowing well
and allows each character to develop logically. She's aided by a topflight
ensemble of actors led by astounding octogenarian Parsons as Violet, who can be
lucid at times and totally addled at others. Cochran is almost painful to watch
as Barbara tries to cope with her disintegrating marriage, her pot-smoking
daughter, her vicious mother and all her other relatives, paying the price with
her own emotional descent. All of the others seem perfectly suited for their
roles. Special note needs to be made of O'Connor, who was a favorite at the Oregon
Shakespeare Festival for
16 years and who has occasionally appeared at various Bay Area theaters.
The
arrival of "August: Osage County," was much anticipated, and now that
it's here, it fulfills expectations and then some. It's well worth another
viewing to catch some of the more subtle connections and to see how early comments
and actions presage what's to come.
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