Review: August: Osage County by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs

Director Dave Steakley proves that with a first-rate cast and a gifted scenic designer he can turn Tracey Letts' savage misanthropy into a mesmerizing long evening in the theatre.

That's no modest achievement.  The last -- and first -- Letts work I saw was Capital T Theatre's Killer Joe, which I found violent and obscene.  Not in the sexual sense, but because Letts took such evident pleasure in degrading his working-class characters. Perhaps Letts is easier to stomach in the Westons' modestly affluent middle-class home than in the trailer park setting of Killer Joe.

Things fall apart in both places.  Or, abjuring Yeats since in the opening scene Letts has the patriarch, retired literature professor Beverly Weston, ramble to the uncomprehending new housekeeper about T.S. Eliot, each play is set in a wasteland populated with hollow men.  And while we're dealing with symbolism, let's get the housekeeper out of the way.  Johnna Monevata is a simple, good-hearted full-blooded Indian -- a native American -- so we can see her as the authentic antithesis to the drug- and alcohol-soaked psycho Weston family that symbolizes the contemporary Anglo heartland.

You won't see Michael Holmes again until the curtain call, for patriarch Beverly Weston disappears, causing confusion and alarm.  After he has been missing for four days, plain-Jane stay-at-home sister Ivy (Irene White) calls her two sisters as well as Aunt Mattie Fae and Uncle Charlie.  All converge on the expansive, bourgeois triple-level set crafted by Zach's Michael Raiford, complete with a mechanical chair on a track by the staircase,  allowing tottering mom Violet to get downstairs.

The Zach jocularly calls it "one bitch of a family reunion."  I call it a gripping extended battle, a sort of lengthy, determined knife fight, in which drug-dazed Violet (Lana Dieterich) and her embittered sister Mattie Fae (Janelle Buchanan) are the chief protagonists.

I don't mean that they're the protagonists of the action.  The Weston clan comprises 11 members in three generations, a cast ample enough for us to thank the Zach for providing a family tree with photographic portraits so that we can understand the relationships as the metaphorical blades flash and the sparks fly.  It takes a while for us to sort it out, even so, and to understand that the central character here is eldest daughter Barbara, played with appalled energy by Austin's favorite middle-aged honey blonde, Lauren Lane.

The women in this family are the ones who count, for the men are mostly ciphers or, frankly, negative numbers.  Letts inverts the relationships among the female Westons.  Mom Vy and Aunt Mattie Fae are mean and as immature as kindergardners, while Lauren Lane as responsible daughter Barbara is obliged to manage the erupting chaos and catastrophe.  Her husband Bill (Chris Gibson) has left her for a college student but accompanies her on this family visit, the first return in many years; her daughterJean (Corley Pillsbury) is an adorably pert purple-haired 15-year-old looking for trouble.  Sister Ivy is a stay-at-home wallflower, thoroughly under the thumb of her mother Vy, while younger sister Karen (Ellie Archer) is a ditz dating Steve Heidbrecht, a despicable smooth-talking lascivious son of a bitch (Greg Baglia).

These folks are severely centifugal, and only a crisis can bring them momentarily together.  As in most family reunions, each has a story to tell or to confess. Shared memories are elicited and old hurts resurrected.  Tracy Letts is a fine craftsman here, building the plot and that family edifice for us and furnishing them with some horrific trap doors and hidden rooms.  The dialogue pops and cracks like a loose high tension wire.  Some is vicious, some is vulgar, some is obscenely funny (for example, the sisters' extended discussion of Vy's propensity to stash her beloved little pills within her private parts).

You don't like these people, but you recognize them as individuals, subject to impossible disadvantages of upbringing, anger or personal weakness.  Letts makes you care about each of them, even the most flawed.   An additional quick kick is seeing Chris Gibson and Lauren Lane again paired as husband and wife, as they were in Becky's New Car last July.  Here the dynamic is completely different, better grounded, presenting a full story in itself.

Director Steakley sets a flashing pace for these three lengthy acts -- starting at 7:30 p.m. and letting out at about 10:45 p.m. -- and wraps you up so tightly that you don't realize that time has passed.  There are plenty of disasters on order here, including a long-suppressed secret that whipsaws the two most vulnerable members of the clan.  There's only one tragedy: the fact that oldest sister Barbara is, against her will, both forced to assume the worst character traits of her vicious and violent mother and is simultaneously deprived of all support and affection.  Again, just as her mother.

 

How can you be a matriarch if you're out of your head on downers and mind-altering drugs?   Lana Dieterich in the role of Violet is de facto now an odds-on favorite for a B. Iden Payne nomination and award for Austin's best actress in a drama.  Her glittering eyes, petite frame, foul mouth and disdainful mien constantly shock, and she brings this character through a wrenching series of transformations:  euphoria, disregard, aggression, despair, celebration, even eventually a tired dignity that gives way first to indifference, then to panic, and finally to a regression to childhood.

Only two characters here are simple and pure of heart: Johnna the housekeeper (Kendra Perez, in a straightforward performance of great strength) and the eternally put-upon, gentle and whimsical Uncle Charlie (our favorite big Michael Stuart, who has a wonderful moment of transformation toward the end, drawing applause from the audience).

No, I don't like Tracy Letts.  It occurred to me that plenty of folks had a similar reaction to Tennessee Williams, a playwright now generally accepted as one of our very best.  Both men write about extremes, about characters who are at the ends of their ropes, many of whom are flawed or frankly debauched.  I wondered for a moment if I had unknowingly drifted into that reactionary impulse generally assumed to characterize the over-55 crowd.

Tennessee Williams created characters suffering great disappointments.  Their dreams had been crushed, but they'd had those hopes, those dreams, going up to the mountains and glimpsing the possibilities.  Williams was a dour idealist.  Letts, in contrast, is a nihilist whose message is that our American culture is rotting at its heart.  He's a man of black humors entertaining us in a wasteland.

I don't buy that message, but it makes for a hell of an evening in the theatre.

Review by Georgia Young for austinist.com, April 7

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, April 8 (with six bite-back commentaries, including notes from UT playwright Johnny Meyers, actress Meredith McCall and actor Tom Parker)

Review by Avimaan Syam for the Austin Chronicle, April 22

Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, April 22

Review by Olin Meadows for AustinOnStage.com, April 27

EXTRA

Click to view excerpts from the Zach Theatre's program for August: Osage County 

Hits as of 2015 03 01: 3949

August: Osage County
by Tracy Letts
Zach Theatre