First things first: Yes, it is all that. “August: Osage County” is a savagely funny and ultimately devastating indictment of the failed experiment that is the American family.
The only thing missing is Willy Loman driving into a tree at the end. And that might be just where one drunken daughter is headed as she walks out the front door.
At 3 1/2 hours, the play may seem like it’s “June, July and August: Osage County.” But it’s the fastest 3 1/2 hours of theater you will ever see.
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Still, the launch of the first national tour here Tuesday also reveals just how close this relentless, secret-revealing play comes to crossing over from tragedy to outright farce.
In 2007, when the brutally efficient Broadway cast was attacking on all cylinders, and the play was sweeping every prize there was to sweep, I counted eight audience “gasp” moments. On Tuesday, only one. Just as often, with secrets erupting like a geyser, the audience laughed.
And why not? On paper, the sheer number of dirty revelations made in one play is patently absurd. The brilliance of the piece is how bone-cuttingly recognizable that will be to anyone from any family not named Brady.
Though there’s some evident miscasting, it’s unfair to compare the casts: This play is new to nearly everyone here. And Tuesday was just the first official performance anywhere by a new company headed by the magnificent Estelle Parsons (who did play the matriarch for nearly a year on Broadway).
Still, the initial difference in delivery, comic timing and overall blunt- force trauma is so evident, the thought of what amateur companies will someday do with this fragile masterpiece is enough to make you start popping pills.
“The situation,” as we are told in the play, “is fraught.”
“August” is almost operatic in its family dysfunction, but at heart it’s a mystery: Beverly, the patriarch of an Oklahoma family, has disappeared, two days after hiring a woman to care for an acidic wife, Violet, whose cancer of the mouth is both literal and metaphoric. Perhaps Beverly has left Violet; and perhaps this boozing, failed poet has killed himself. Grown daughters Barbara, Ivy and Karen, each in varying stages of relationship danger, have now re-gathered to confront the crisis — and the truth that their dad really never much cared for them.
Playwright Tracy Letts’ crowning accomplishment is caustic Violet, who’s developed a pill addiction from a diseased mouth that’s constantly on fire. It’s one of the most considerable characters ever created for the stage.
At 81, Parsons (“Bonnie & Clyde” and “Roseanne”) is 16 years too old for the role, which is refreshing. After all, how often do you get to say that about an actress in a lead role? Yet she’s astonishing, first in late- night scenes when the pills turn her speech incoherent, and again at the dinner table, where she delivers one of the most biting stage speeches of all time. In it, she reveals how she became this hardened. It’s an opportunity for sympathy — but instead she leaves no one at the table unscathed.Violet knows all, and she whips out her daggers and flings them when they will do maximum damage.
What makes her so haunting, harrowing and resonant is that she’s also the most honest person in the room. She’s the rare, truth-telling antagonist who will say it to your face.
Of course, the mother-daughter antipathy is comically heightened in the play. When oldest daughter Barbara takes charge and seizes all her pills, Violet promises to eat her alive. It’s a thing of wicked beauty to watch Parsons and the great Shannon Cochran go at it all night, because there are trace elements of love.
From “Death of a Salesman” to “American Beauty,” the classics of this genre present a single family to tell us something bigger about America at a specific time and place.
So when all is said and bludgeoned here, what are we to take from the Westons?
They reveal an emotionally stunted America caught in a hamster wheel of continuing addiction, abuse and instability. And Letts never cops out from that. He leaves us with a family that can only remain even incidentally tethered if by distance, rather than proximity, in a hard world that families make harder, rather than easier, to endure.
We meet Beverly only briefly, but his quote of John Berryman’s gets trapped in our skulls: “The world is gradually becoming a place where I do not care to be anymore.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
