AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY
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August: Osage County is heartbreaking in its attention to emotional nuance and captivating in its gruff compassion. It’s also riotously funny. Set in a small town, it inevitably inspires comparison with such masterworks as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, but it never rides on the coattails of those plays. This work stands on its own.
The play’s elegiac tone comes from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Family patriarch and retired academic Beverly (played with soulful weariness by Letts’s own father, Dennis) quotes from the poem in the first scene, while he’s interviewing a young Native American woman, Johnna Monevata, to be the housekeeper and caretaker for his cancer-stricken wife, Vi. Beverly explains the troubled marriage Eliot had with his first wife, Vivienne, to Johnna and gives her a book of Eliot’s poems. Quoting poetry is all Beverly can do–he no longer writes it, and his one acclaimed collection came out 40 years earlier. As his prospects vanished, Beverly and Vi became locked in emotional warfare fortified by pills for her and liquor for him. By the second scene Beverly has mysteriously disappeared. Alarmed, a host of family members–new combatants armed with devastating revelations–enters the oppressive house: it’s an unbearably hot August, and Vi keeps the place un-air-conditioned and tapes the blinds shut.
The wrong director and cast might have turned the play’s delicate balance of deep-rooted sorrow and outrageously funny family pettiness into a cartoon of dysfunction, like an extended-play version of Mama’s Family or a Beth Henley-style show full of chicken-fried wackiness. Shapiro masterfully handles the overlapping dialogue and multiple agendas, and the performers give their complex characters an affecting humanity. All suffer from the syndrome of thwarted dreams: instead of having the blues, Barbara says, they have “the Plains.” By the end, when all but two people have left the house, a line from another Eliot poem, “Ash Wednesday,” came to mind: “We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other.”
