August: Osage County
If Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams collaborated on a play, it might turn out something like August: Osage County, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as funny. Instead the play, which recently won a Pulitzer Prize for its author, Tracy Letts, incorporates a distinctly modern spin on the kind of Gothic melodramas that constitute the classics of American drama. It is, quite simply, one of the best plays I've seen or read in years. It's a long play, three hours and twenty minutes, but I wouldn't mind seeing it again tomorrow (if only so I can catch some of the lines I might have missed due to my diminished hearing).
The play is a kind of Oklahoma gothic, and covers well-worn territory--a family that is permanently at each's others throats. This family is the Westons. The father is Beverly, a poet and teacher who drinks to excess. His wife is Violet, who pops pills. Beverly says that he drinks and she takes pills, because that is the bargain they have struck (and their marriage contract is a "cruel covenant.") They have three daughters: the eldest is Barbara, who moved away to Colorado with her husband, also a professor, and a teen-aged daughter; Ivy, the middle girl, an unmarried woman who still lives in town and is badgered by her mother for her lack of style; and Karen, who lives in Florida. They all reunite for a funeral, and over the course of the play there are many recriminations and secrets revealed, as these characters are like scorpions trapped together in a bottle.
Violet Weston is a larger-than-life creation, who will rank right up there among female characters of a certain age of American drama like Mary Tyrone and Amanda Wingfield. She is played by Deanna Dunagan, and I don't follow this too closely but I would think she's a shoo-in for a Tony for Best Actress. Resembling Nancy Reagan, she's like Mammy Yokum on meth, a monster of a sort, dispensing the truth, no matter how vicious, with a certain glee. She tells her sister, whom she loves, that she's "as sexy as a wet cardboard box" (Violet believes that women get ugly when they get older, and tells one of her daughters that she's proving her point). Violet takes all sorts of pills, and calls them the best friends she's got.
Barbara is her most frequent foil. As played by Amy Morton (who should win Best Supporting Actress) she's trying to keep a separation from her husband secret (he is played by Jeff Perry in another fine performance). He's sleeping with a student (a trite misstep of plot--if professors slept with students as often as they do in film and literature I would think parents would be reluctant to send their daughters to college) and the teen-aged daughter, Jean, is a dope-smoking nymphette. My favorite moment in this production was at the close of Act II, when Barbara proclaims, "I am running things now!" I realized at that moment that I was an undergoing some kind of catharsis, the kind usually reserved for hearing great music or seeing a great film, something I can't ever recall experiencing while watching a straight play.
To be honest, the plot is not very original. A character is revealed as a pervert, and there is a revelation about falsely assumed parentage that you might expect on General Hospital, but Letts' dialogue is so musically profane and full of brio that it's easy to forgive whatever creaks about the story. Also, if you have a family that gets along in any way, shape or form you will appreciate them even more after watching the horrors of this type of family. "This madhouse is my home!" Barbara screams. They are selling t-shirts in the lobby with that quote on them.
The play is a kind of Oklahoma gothic, and covers well-worn territory--a family that is permanently at each's others throats. This family is the Westons. The father is Beverly, a poet and teacher who drinks to excess. His wife is Violet, who pops pills. Beverly says that he drinks and she takes pills, because that is the bargain they have struck (and their marriage contract is a "cruel covenant.") They have three daughters: the eldest is Barbara, who moved away to Colorado with her husband, also a professor, and a teen-aged daughter; Ivy, the middle girl, an unmarried woman who still lives in town and is badgered by her mother for her lack of style; and Karen, who lives in Florida. They all reunite for a funeral, and over the course of the play there are many recriminations and secrets revealed, as these characters are like scorpions trapped together in a bottle.
Violet Weston is a larger-than-life creation, who will rank right up there among female characters of a certain age of American drama like Mary Tyrone and Amanda Wingfield. She is played by Deanna Dunagan, and I don't follow this too closely but I would think she's a shoo-in for a Tony for Best Actress. Resembling Nancy Reagan, she's like Mammy Yokum on meth, a monster of a sort, dispensing the truth, no matter how vicious, with a certain glee. She tells her sister, whom she loves, that she's "as sexy as a wet cardboard box" (Violet believes that women get ugly when they get older, and tells one of her daughters that she's proving her point). Violet takes all sorts of pills, and calls them the best friends she's got.
Barbara is her most frequent foil. As played by Amy Morton (who should win Best Supporting Actress) she's trying to keep a separation from her husband secret (he is played by Jeff Perry in another fine performance). He's sleeping with a student (a trite misstep of plot--if professors slept with students as often as they do in film and literature I would think parents would be reluctant to send their daughters to college) and the teen-aged daughter, Jean, is a dope-smoking nymphette. My favorite moment in this production was at the close of Act II, when Barbara proclaims, "I am running things now!" I realized at that moment that I was an undergoing some kind of catharsis, the kind usually reserved for hearing great music or seeing a great film, something I can't ever recall experiencing while watching a straight play.
To be honest, the plot is not very original. A character is revealed as a pervert, and there is a revelation about falsely assumed parentage that you might expect on General Hospital, but Letts' dialogue is so musically profane and full of brio that it's easy to forgive whatever creaks about the story. Also, if you have a family that gets along in any way, shape or form you will appreciate them even more after watching the horrors of this type of family. "This madhouse is my home!" Barbara screams. They are selling t-shirts in the lobby with that quote on them.
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