By Kelly Oristano
“All happy families are alike. And then there’s Tracy Letts.” (— Leo Tolstoy, if he’d been a 21st-century theater critic)
August: Osage County, onstage now at The Very Little Theatre and directed by Carol McDonnell, is playwright Tracy Letts’ 21st-century masterpiece of memory, dysfunction, and disinhibition. Embellishing childhood memories of his life in rural Oklahoma, where no-one has The Blues, but everyone has “The Plains,” Letts wrote a challenging play about breaking cycles of generational trauma half a decade before trauma cycle-breaking entered the pop-psychology mainstream.
Focusing on the women of the clan — ailing mother Violet and three disaffected daughters: Ivy, Barbara, and Karen — Osage explores the thoughtful and emotional side of trauma and strife as much or more than the shouty-screamy side. Letts writes women as well as any other male playwright working. (Carrie Coon wouldn’t marry a schlub.)
In Osage, the men who are foils to the Weston women show every way to ruin or end a male/female relationship, while the women contextualize and endure, even as they call out the “enduring female” as a misogynist trope and undue transfer of labor from men to women. The Westons are left by suicide, by prosaic infidelity, by accidental incest, and by over-the-top all-around sex-pest assholery. (The opening night audience gave a sardonic cheer when Steve finally got his well-choreographed comeuppance.)
And because it’s Tracy Letts, the suicide and incest and all-around assholery are of course awful but also more than a bit funny. It’s a well-crafted and conceived play that puts all these women, and everyone around them, in positions to have that sudden snap change in perspective that great drama has been providing since Ancient Greece.
They’re not a prototypical Oklahoman family, the Westons. The patriarch Beverly was a prize-winning poet and respected academic in the ’70s and ’80s, now long-retired. Most Oklahomans don’t live lives steeped in the oeuvre of TS Eliot, whose ghost may have more influence on this play than on CATS. Though in Osage County, apparently August is the cruelest month, breeding an opioid crisis out of the dead land.
VLT’s production is ambitious and broadly successful. Tim Tendick’s set is an expansive and shabby high plains suburban tract home that last had a style update in 1982. Faded wood paneling and country kitsch tell you exactly who and where, and even when, these people are. The set provides many roomlets for the dozens of small scenes within larger scenes to play out. Occasionally the whole cast is playing around the whole house, but more often groups of two or three are playing in pools of light that cordon off smaller areas of the home, occasionally to claustrophobic effect. All production departments went above and beyond the call for this show. Special plaudits go to the props managers, Jamie Brokopp and Brandi Vance. This show goes through plates and food and tableware like hungry hippos go through white marbles.
McDonnell’s cast are powerful actors and have created full and interesting characters, from top to bottom. Nancy West, (Violet) Jennifer Sellers, (Barbara) and Laura Robinson (MattieFae) all have sharp, crisp, distinct voices which breathe character and energy into the proceedings and were a delight to see and hear onstage together. Mari Kenney and Chris Bucklew have a dynamic chemistry as Ivy and Little Charles. Paul Dunckel and Blake Beardsley bring the heat as Bill and Steve, giving full dimensionality and empathy to characters that could remain cardboard cutouts in less capable hands. Marty Brown is wonderful as Charlie. His impromptu prayer at the big family dinner is a standout moment. Smaller parts are played with conscientious care and excellence by Christiana Dancer, Jennifer Appleby Chu, Chris Brokopp, Ella Killingsworth and Steve Wehmeier.
For everything these people go through, and they go through an incredible amount, there’s a hidden heroism in the fact that they all keep trying. No one gets cancelled, no one gets disowned or estranged for the hat they wear, everyone talks until the conversations are all finished. One character even opines that the greatest generation wasn’t so great because “they hated Nazis? Who doesn’t hate Nazis?”
Though the play is only a decade-and-a-half old, the things that divide American families have changed drastically in the interim. Lines like, “Genocide always seems like a good idea at the time,” which were groaners with a satirical bent in 2008, play like daggers pointed right at the possibly complacent theatergoers who’ve been laughing at casually insensitive jokes about Indigenous Americans for the preceding 15 minutes.
VLT cannot have known where we would be as a country when scheduling August: Osage County more than a year ago, but at moments the choice feels predestined. A memory play it may be, but it put your reviewer’s mind squarely on the future’s history of our present, what today’s 5-year-olds will hate us for in 30 years, and on Adam Smith’s timeless wisdom: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Editor’s Note: August: Osage County continues at The Very Little Theatre through Feb. 9, 2025
When: Evenings at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 6-8; Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. on Feb. 2 and 9
Where: The Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard St., Eugene
Tickets: $26; available online at TheVLT.com or through the box office at 541-344-7751
