I've recently come across a playscript that should be required reading for anyone who cares about American theater. Tracy Letts' August: Osage County (Theatre Communications Group, $13.95) is the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and abundantly deserves that award and 10 others besides. The play, which first opened at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago before moving to Broadway, is a knockdown drag-out portrait of a family unlike any other since … Well, I'll get to that. But to begin at the beginning:
An American Nightmare. All is not well in the Weston household of Pawhuska, Okla. Matriarch Violet is a pill-popping, foul-mouthed terror whose alcoholic husband Beverly is missing and may have committed suicide. Coming to console their mother as the search for Beverly proceeds are daughter Barbara, whose husband Bill is sleeping with a teenaged student; daughter Karen, whose fiancé Steve has his eyes on 14-year-old Jean; and daughter Ivy, deeply in love with her first cousin Little Charlie, a pitiful wreck of a man whose greatest enemy is his mother Mattie Fae.
As the Westons and their in-laws try to comfort the pharmaceutically-altered Violet, the sheriff arrives with the news that a bloated, disfigured body has been found in a lake and it's probably Beverly. The death of her husband makes Violet all the more vicious: After the funeral, she verbally assaults her children and their spouses, and enrages Barbara so much that the latter physically attacks her, leading to an intra-family melee that's both shocking and hilarious. In the whole turbulent mess, there's only one force for sanity, and that's the Native American housemaid Johnna, who cooks and comforts and defends young Jean from sexual assault.
But Johnna is in the minority in this viper's nest, and when adultery and incest within the family are revealed, her kindness and decency are powerless to restrain a new round of offenses. The Westons, it seems, will forever lurch from outrage to outrage.
So why is the play so special? The first reason is its metaphorical power. Like the family in Sam Shepard's Buried Child, the Westons seem to represent America, or at least the white America that took the continent from its native inhabitants and converted it to the site of the Jerry Springer Show. "The jokers who settled this place," muses Barbara at a key moment in the drama, "The Germans and the Dutch and the Irish. Who was the asshole who saw this flat hot nothing and planted his flag? I mean, we fucked the Indians for this?"
In America today, author Letts seems to be saying, there is no normal, there are no decent, righteous people living admirable, dignified lives. Karen and Steve's relationship, which at first seems storybook romantic, turns out not to be so immaculate when Steve is found pawing Jean ("She said she was 15!" he explains), and Ivy's love for Little Charlie, which begins by looking pathetic but hopeful, turns out to be as grotesque as any other. And then there's cancerous Violet, the eldest, the most experienced character, who instead of dispensing wisdom and compassion, dispenses "Valium. Vicodin. Darvon. Darvocet. Percodan. Xanax for fun. OxyContin in a pinch. Some Black Mollies once … And of course Dilaudid."
When she's not lambasting one of her children, she's jerkily dancing to Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally" or telling an in-law to "blow it out your ass." So much for the wisdom of the ages.
The next reason that the play is so notable is in its conscious descent from that most celebrated of dysfunctional family dramas, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. After all, matriarch Mary Tyrone is a morphine addict, just as Violet Weston is addicted to her pills, and just as the Tyrone men have to witness Mary's relapse, the Weston daughters experience Violet's own, and do their best to rid the house of any capsule they can find. But where O'Neill's play never really aims at anything beyond (breathtaking) autobiography, Letts' drama is post-'60s (Beverly, we learn, was a famous poet in the '60s), and now the "morphine" is everywhere — in Violet's hidden canisters, in Jean's glass pipe, and in "Chamber of Commerce guy" Steve's possession ("I just happen to have some really tasty shit," he tells his young victim). Then there's all the alcohol in the play — another allusion to the hard-drinking Tyrone men — and there's even an indirect nod to O'Neill's title, when the Weston house's shades, formerly taped shut, are finally opened in Act 3, leaving "nighttime … free to encroach."
There is one huge difference between the two plays, though: In Letts' world there's no figure of hope like Edmund Tyrone, no suspicion that even one damaged character may find his way into the open. But if Letts' perspective is unpersuasively exhaustive — we all know that in fact there are decent people, and some of them do have happy lives — you can't fault him for offering his vision without compromise. Sometimes it takes an unstinting jeremiad to make a point.
Which brings me to the last reason the play is so effective. There's nothing so fraught with conflict as family — that group we never chose, but with whom we live in often all-too-close quarters. If you've ever had one humiliating exchange with a parent, sibling or spouse, if you've ever found yourself wondering why your kin are so aberrant, if you've ever had your buttons pushed by someone who ought to know you better, you'll recognize your problem in the battling, unruly, indecent Westons.
It's all here, all the harm that's only possible among people who know each other deeply, who understand just how to wound and how to pile insult on injury. August: Osage County has been criticized for a certain sitcom-ish quality, but I think that's unfair: The relationships sketched in the play are terribly serious. There are no bystanders here; only abusers and abused. And the abusers are determined to leave long, deep scars.
So now, Bay area theaters: Who'll be first to produce an unusually resonant play that may turn out to be an American classic?
August: Osage County is extraordinary. It can't get here too soon.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2008.
