Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play, August: Osage County, now runs with several new cast members. (For a review of the original cast, see Berkshire Review for the Arts, June 17th 2008.) Gone are Deanna Dunagan, a Tony-award recipient for her portrayal of the puff-adder matriarch Violet Weston; Rondi Reed as her untrustworthy sister Mattie Fae (another Tony-winning performance); Francis Guinan as Mattie’s husband Charles and Ian Barford as their sad-sack offspring, Little Charles; and Jeff Perry as Violet’s son-in-law, an adulterous academic. (Note: some plot twists are revealed below, so be warned.)
The play more than survives the adjustment. The role of Violet now belongs to Estelle Parsons, who makes an alarmingly convincing drug addict. In the first act she seems much of the time to be a dithery, shattered old lady whose mumbled words can be incomprehensible. Parsons slowly reveals Violet’s iron-fingered grasp on what matters to her – not reality, exactly, but her own corner of it. Violet proves to be most dangerous when she seems most wilted, addled, or defeated, and her eyes gleam with cunning vitality. It is her play, to a great extent, for all the large ensemble and intricate interplay among the characters. Violet rules her own little terrarium, a farmhouse in rural Oklahoma, sweltering in the late summer heat (the looming set, designed by Todd Rosenthal, becomes a kind of human Habitrail). Throughout the first two acts the windows of the house are closed, covered with brown paper and tape. As more and more family members arrive to deal with a family crisis—Violet’s husband, a drunken, broken-down poet, has gone missing—the heat and tension rise (a helpful genealogical chart in the program allows you to keep track of the characters). And when the husband is found drowned, an apparent suicide, we are set for a funeral dinner that rapidly devolves, under Violet’s ring-master mockery, into physical violence.
The play calls to mind other representations of family dysfunction, including O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Hellman’s The Little Foxes, Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, and, most recently, Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate. But it evokes just as readily the female villainy, plot twists, and family agita of soap operas. The secondary plot centered on Mattie Fae and her family is particularly redolent of daytime television, and Molly Regan doesn’t pack quite the punch of Rondi Reed, but Robert Foxworth and Jim True-Frost offer the play its rare moments of convincing family feeling. The first act is rather weak, serving mostly to set up the full-tilt power plays of the second and third acts, which have an inescapable rude force. We may recognize many of the plot elements as conventional, but we can’t help but give the characters our full attention. At the end of the second act Violet’s eldest daughter Barbara, pushed over the edge by her mother’s taunts (Violet has figured out Barbara’s husband has left her for a student), attempts to strangle her and then, in lieu of murder, stages an impromptu intervention and pill-hunt. She may know that, to Violet, this is worse than death. When Violet tries to reassert control Barbara, electrified with rage, stands over her and bellows, “I’m in control now!” It’s a great act drop.
Letts gives us a rigorously unsentimental vision of family, up to the very end. There is little reconciliation to be found here. Barbara and her two sisters, despite some half-hearted bonding scenes, will not stay in touch (middle sister Ivy states as much); the family of Violet’s sister Mattie Fae is revealed to be a sham built on incest – it’s the play’s grim joke that the most loving family bond we see, that between Mattie’s husband Charles and son Little Charles, is not in fact a biological one—and Barbara’s marriage seems definitely over. Original cast members Amy Morton, Sally Murphy, and Mariann Mayberry remain as the sisters, and their interplay with Parsons is taught and convincing (I did find Murphy a bit young-looking for her part). The ensemble builds an intricate and convincing picture of family misery as legacy, even in the small details. The local sheriff, Deon Gilbeau (Troy West), comes complete with a sad back-story of a ne’er-do-well father who stole his car on prom night; Violet, to illustrate her own mother’s vicious streak, tells a tale of a particularly mean-spirited Christmas gift; Mattie Fae compulsively belittles her son and hides from him the truth of his paternity.
The darkness runs deeper. Material things win out over people. Violet’s pills are an obvious case, and by the end of the play we see just how tight her grasp on the material truly is (in melodramatic fashion, the contents of a safe deposit box play a key role). But there are other flashes: baby sister Karen, dreaming since childhood of the perfect honeymoon trip, is willing to overlook her fiancé’s advances towards her underage niece (at least she’ll get to go to Belize, she remarks); and that niece, Barbara’s teenage daughter Jean (Madeleine Martin, finding here an even more troubled family than the one she has on Showtime’s Californication), displays some alarming family characteristics in her determined pursuit of good weed.
Generically, the play runs into problems. The cruelty and rage here induce laughter – a lot of it. The dinner scene is hilariously awful, and Letts is good at finding fresh ways to draw humor from very familiar dramatic situations. But where to then? The concluding image is of a family hopelessly stunted and turned inward: Barbara, for instance, grows to resemble both her parents, while her sister Karen in the end plans to run off with her lover/cousin/brother Little Charles. Letts would seem to be resisting any glimmer of transcendence or redemption, and denying any glimpse of a comic ending (in which, traditionally, we should recognize some sense of continuity and restoration of community). At the same time the play, in its emphasis on the mean and petty, resists a tragic reading.
Letts can’t quite keep his cold-eyed vision to the end, however. And it is in this inconsistency that the play’s real weakness lies. There are only a couple of outsider figures: the sheriff Deon, who went to school with Barbara; and Johnna, a local Cheyenne woman Beverly hires as a housekeeper in the opening scene, just before his disappearance. Kimberly Guerrero does the best she can with this role, but I’m afraid Johnna has some very musty, stereotypically noble qualities. She stands in contrast to Weston clan in her quiet watchfulness and kindness, her practical nature and spirituality. Her most valued possession is a necklace containing her placenta (a tribal tradition, apparently), an object that connects her to her soul. She is the only person on stage to receive an authentic gift or legacy: Beverly bestows upon her a copy of T.S. Eliot’s poems. That opening scene with Beverly and Johnna, in which the wrecked old man quotes the poet (“Life is very long”), and the concluding scene with Violet and Johnna, in which the distraught old woman is embraced and comforted by an Eliot-quoting Johnna (“This is the way the world ends”), are clearly meant to provide a meaningful frame for the family bear-baiting exercise that is the rest of the play. The attempt at framing fails, and we are left with a (admittedly highly entertaining) slugfest. We might accept Violet as the last woman standing at the end of the play; Violet being hugged by a walking symbol of the Plains is something else entirely. Violet, earlier in the play, wonders what this Indian is doing in her attic. Apparently she’s Letts’s notion of a deus ex machina.
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