Attempting to breathe new life into the all-too-familiar dysfunctional family theme, playwright Tracy Letts presents the Westons in his recent play, August: Osage County. With memorable cynicism and embittered humor, Letts portrays the family as engaging and almost sympathetic, despite their venom and vitriol.
Yet there is a sense of disconnectedness in this highly praised tragicomedy, which is playing for a limited time at the Imperial Theatre. Taken together, Letts’ plot and characterization are almost too vehement, and the audience can neither fathom the family’s spite nor forgive them their trespasses.
The harsh humor of Letts’ script detracts from its tragic weight, and the result is something like Malcolm in the Middle meets Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Although the family’s sitcom-like shenanigans and outbursts are appealing with their kooky familiarity and smarting punch lines, this play is by no means a sitcom. In August, Letts seems to beg for an NC-17 rating and touches upon everything from drugs and alcohol to adultery, incest, and suicide.
Letts aims high in his ambitious three-and-half-hour-long saga, which impressively does not drag despite its marathon length. It enables the audience to acclimate to life with the Westons, to fall into their rhythm, and to adjust to their mannerisms. Revealing one dirty family secret after another, Letts keeps the audience absorbed.
But the play’s length is not without its negative effects. The elaborate sequence of sensational revelations and plot twists dulls the audience’s reaction to drama and forces Letts to rely on shock-and-awe tactics.
The entirety of the play takes place in August at the Weston family summer home in Osage County, Okla. A three-tiered ramshackle house, designed by Todd Rosenthal, dominates the stages. With shadows cast by hazy orange stage lights, the set evokes the oppressive heat of a windless August in Oklahoma. Intensifying the sense of suffocating stagnation, the Westons insist on keeping the windows curtained and closed. Furthering the sense of foreboding, the housetop teeters impressively high, as if the roof might just coming crashing down if someone screams or slams the door too loudly.
Despite its atmospheric effects, though, the stage seems too big for the intimate portrait of family that Letts presents. In many ways, the performance would be more forceful if the audience felt closer to the tension, rather than detached from it because of the bright lights and raised stage—and Letts’ script has the potential to carry the weight on its own without the staged special effects.
The play succeeds when Letts simplifies things. When he trusts the power of his words and the integrity of his work, he humanizes his characters and gives them penetrating voices. As the first scene begins, Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts), the patriarch of the Weston clan, welcomes the audience into his home with a cheery summary of his marriage: “My wife takes pills, and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck.” In Beverly’s bittersweet self-recognition, Letts displays the subtle power elicited by pain painted over with humor. However, the pathetic disappointment of this confession, its poignant subtlety, does not appear enough throughout the rest of the play. Beverly vanishes in the next scene. He simply walks out the front door and is never seen again. Unfortunately, the initial silenced suffering Letts conjures here also vanishes.
The action of the play takes off as the Westons come to terms with Beverly’s disappearance. From both far and near, Beverly’s three adult daughters reluctantly come to the aid of their thorny mother, Violet, a fierce alcoholic and prescription drug-abuser. With unblinking ferocity in her eyes, Violet, played by the forceful Deanna Dunagan, cackles in a loud southern squawk at her relatives’ futile attempts to makes sense of Beverly’s disappearance. With her hilarious sneers, Violet does not seem to feel a shred of love for anyone, including herself.
It does not take too long for Violet and the other Westons to start picking at old family scabs. Violet pecks at Ivy (Sally Murphy), her second daughter and the only one who stayed in Oklahoma, and berates her as a dowdy and unbetrothed lesbian. Ivy does her best to maintain her dignity, but cannot keep cool around her older sister Barbara (Amy Morton), who in her eyes is the successful one and her competition for the title of Dad’s favorite. Barbara eventually emerges as chief executive of the family, while into this upheaval arrives Karen (Mariann Mayberry), the always-overlooked youngest daughter, along with her shifty fiance. Immediately she begins to contribute her customary platitudes and romantic expectations in attempted moral support. But with Violet as the hostile and both physically and mentally deteriorating matriarch, all the Westons feel on the outs in their own home.
Before his disappearance, Beverly hired Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero), a Native American housekeeper, whose alien presence increases the tension and discord within the Weston home. Barely speaking louder than a husky whisper, Johnna pads softly around the house and rectifies the wreckage Violet and her kin leave in the wake of their battles. But her character lacks depth, and the audience is left wondering why Letts portrays her as the play’s token beacon of hope.
In many ways, the production is a very much a first draft that would be greatly improved by some serious editing. There are too many characters and sadly, many of their subtleties are overlooked. Letts focuses on the Weston women and dramatizes their hysterics. The Weston men are far more sympathetic and perhaps even more complicated than the women, but they are completely marginalized by their wives and daughters. Letts leaves too many rich opportunities untapped and underdeveloped and instead goes for the fireworks.
If only Letts had the confidence to trust his audience and his dramatic skills, perhaps August would be the flawless epic so many critics have deemed it to be. With greater subtlety and less drama, Letts has the potential to reinvent the Southern-gothic genre of antecedents, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. Evoking the age-old argument of show versus tell, Letts gives us the rendering of a truly dysfunctional family, when it would have been refreshing to get a glimpse into the tragic unraveling of one.