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A CurtainUp Review
August: Osage County


This situation is fraught.— an in a nutshell assessment of what August: Osage County is about from one of its many characters.
Jeff Perry & Amy Morton in August: Osage County
Jeff Perry and Amy Morton in August: Osage County
(Photo: Michael Brosilow).  
The latest theatrical bombshell from Tracy Letts (author of such corrosive dramas as Killer Joe and Bug plays like a highlights collection from dysfunctional family classics. There's the booze-ridden recriminations and drug-fueled mad scenes from Long Day's Journey, the spousal squabbling of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Achilles-heel fighting straight out of Glass Menagerie. As one character says, "This situation is fraught." Most astonishing is an ending that's exactly taken from The Little Foxes, with the vicious family matriarch left abandoned by the daughter for whom she sacrificed everything.

At three and a half hours and featuring a cast of 13, Anna Shapiro's Steppenwolf world premiere is generous, if you like toxic soap opera. Eventually, it's overwhelming, as if a tranquilizer dart kicked in and the shock effects of pederasty, illegitimacy and incest no longer registered. But there's no questioning that, however grotesque the confessions and upchucking the revelations, they carry the shock of the familiar and the thrill of the known.

The plot device that assembles this nest of vipers is almost too easy: the clan's patriarch Beverly Weston (played by the author's father) kills himself, providing the pretext for a family reunion in a hot Oklahoma country manse. Immediately immersed in the snake pit, we're introduced to the spiteful, vindictive, pill-popping widow (Deanne Dunagan, ferociously cast against her delicate type), dying of mouth cancer, and the three daughters whose worthless love matches reflect and perpetuate the parents' monumental marital mess. There's a randy uncle preying on his very willing teenage niece, two cousins who are into more than kissing, and an aunt whose happiness consists of belittling her imbecile son. In sharp contrast and with great dignity, Kimberly Guerrero plays the Native-American housekeeper who witnesses the Westons' self-destruction with the same hapless passivity with which her ancestors saw Indian Territory carved up into Oklahoma.

Shapiro's ensemble includes Steppenwolf's sturdiest character actors, particularly Rondi Reed as a tough-loving harridan mother, Amy Morton as the undervalued daughter who turns on her monster mother, and Jeff Perry as her cipher of a husband, a philandering professor who should never get tenure.

Carnivorous to the end, August is a play that in effect eats itself up as, disposing and dispensing, it hurls its characters from the house, their miseries pitilessly but realistically unresolved. By default, our sympathy goes to the dead father whose suicide slowly and surely makes all the sense in the world. The play quotes T.S. Eliot saying (early in his career), "Life is very long." So is August: Osage County.
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AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY Playwright: Tracy Letts
Directed by Anna Shapiro
Cast: Dennis Letts (Beverly Weston), Deanna Dunagan (Violet Weston), Amy Morton (Barbara Fordham), Jeff Perry (Bill Fordham), Fawn Johnstin (Jean Fordham), Sally Murphy (Ivy Weston), Mariann Mayberry (Karen Weston), Rondi Reed (Mattie Fae Ailen), Francis Guinan (Carlie Aiken), Ian Barford (Little Charles), Kimberly Guerrero (Johnna Monevata), Rick Snyder (Steve Heidebrecht), and Troy West (Sheriff Deon Gibeau)
Sets: Todd Rosenthal
Lighting: Ann G. Wrightson
Costumes: Ana Kuzmanic
Sound: Richard Woodbury
Running time: 3 hours 25 minutes with two intermissions
Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St., Chicago; 312-335-1650
From June 28 to August 26, 2007; opening July 7
Tues to Sat 7:30pm; Sat, Sun at 3pm
Reviewed by Lawrence Bommer based on July 7th performance
broadway musicals: the 101 greatest shows of all time
Easy-on-the budget super gift for yourself and your musical loving friends. Tons of gorgeous pictures.


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©Copyright 2007, Elyse Sommer.
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