- Liz Lauren
- The latest from Deanna Dunagan’s collection of matriarchs: Polly Wyeth in Other Desert Cities
In 2007, Chicago-based actress Deanna Dunagan appeared in the original Steppenwolf Theatre production of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, stunning everybody with her performance as Violet Weston—the foul-mouthed (“Why don’t you go fuck a fucking sow’s ass?”), savage (“I’ll eat you alive, girl!”), drug-addled (“Gizza cig . . . some cigezze? Cig-zezz, cig-zizz, cig-zuhzzz”) matriarch of a monumentally dysfunctional Oklahoma family. Later that year the production moved to Broadway and Dunagan won a best-actress Tony Award. This week she opened at Goodman Theatre as the more genteel but equally formidable mama Polly Wyeth. In Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, Polly runs a prominent, west-coast Republican family with significant baggage. Our conversation is offered in two installments. In this first one, Dunagan sweetly but firmly disabuses me of a lot of misconceptions regarding Baitz’s play and her character.
Well, Polly is in complete control. She’s so rigidly in control that she’s about to snap, and she’s held it together for all these years—not that she doesn’t self-medicate. Violet is a mess and truly vicious, and I don’t think Polly really is.
