August: Osage County
Music Box Theatre, NYC
Live Review: 5/27/08
***
In the Pulitzer Prize winning play, August: Osage County , Tracy Letts tells the tale of a rural Oklahoman family so dysfunctional, one could label them “highly gifted”. As a venomous black comedy, female-centric version of Long Day’s Journey into Night , this three-hour pilgrimage into the plains both tickles and disturbs to the core. Violet Weston, played by Deanna Dunagan, has swallowed many pills in her life of the bitter, upper and downer varieties, and the audience watches with “and I thought my family was messed up!” awe as the savage dysfunction pumps down the family tree to her three daughters and one granddaughter, nearly all destined to march by the beat of an extremely perverse and pathological drum. From addiction to pedophilia to incest, the plotlines are easily worthy of daytime drama and run the gamut of all that could go wrong in contemporary society, particularly when monster mothers like Violet take personal misfortune and hardship and hold it shamelessly against anyone in their path, including her own children.
It’s always darkest before it goes black in the Weston home; however the Music Box Theater is shot to life with the superb acting, direction and dialogue. The play is thick with monologues which sound more like character descriptions the playwright wrote for himself when developing, than speeches for performance. The acting is so specific the audience doesn’t need such long-winded introductions of who each character is. It’s evident in the way Violet limps angrily down the stairs, the way Barbara, expertly performed by Amy Morton obsessively sets a table, and the way the youngest, Karen, played by Mariann Mayberry, gobbles black olives off her fingertips. Letts already shows, so there is no need to tell.
The only point he could have expanded upon is the “why” of patriarch Beverly Weston’s inciting disappearance. The brief time the audience shares with him at the top of the show indicates he finds a sick yet entertaining humor in what the Weston family has become (we all do). He tells their Native American maid, “My wife takes pills, and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck,” and he seems more amused than bitter; but perhaps that’s just the lifetime of Jack Daniels speaking.
Like the monologues, the set, a towering house sliced like a doll’s so the audience can see in, does
little for the show. The rooms were not utilized to enlighten character or plot but rather to change up the location to offer a new room for one character to berate another in. Only the staircase seems to elaborate, creating hypnotic suspense when climbed in either direction. With a brilliant editor who would have been willing to cut a third, August: Osage County , with its colorful characters the audience loves to hate, laugh at, and “get even” with, would have been perfect, able to contend with all the famous literary ranks of evil mothers. After all, it offers such pearls of wisdom for coming of age: “Thank God we can’t tell the future,” Amy Morton’s character observes, “or we’d never get out of bed.”
