Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✭
by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna D. Shapiro
Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
November 5-15, 2009
To use that old reviewers’ cliché, run don’t walk to see August: Osage County. There is real urgency. The 2008 Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner for Best Play is in Toronto only till November 15. Miss it and you’ll miss the greatest American play of the first decade of the 21st century performed by a flawless cast headed by the incomparable Estelle Parsons.
Todd Rosenthal’s marvellous set shows us a cutaway view of the three-storey Weston family house in rural Oklahoma. There we meet the alcoholic poet and patriarch Beverly (Jon DeVries), his foul-mouthed, pain-killer-addicted wife Violet (Parsons) and their three daughters Barbara (Shannon Cochran), Ivy (Angelica Torn) and Karen (Amy Warren). When Beverly disappears, it is as if King Lear had had three daughters by Lady Macbeth and abdicated leaving his kingdom to her. Violet suffers from cancer of the mouth literally and figuratively spewing a venom of hatred, disguised as “truth-telling,” over her entire extended brood assembled for a family dinner from hell after Beverly’s funeral.
In the tradition of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, Tracy Letts sees the family as a microcosm of of the nation. Given that Letts’s period is the Bush administration, the “family” has degenerated into drug-addled tyranny that compulsively destroys all ideals in its path in the name of “truth.” Letts’s America anaesthetizes itself through lies, fiction, booze, drugs or sex because it can no longer tolerate the reality it has created. Letts’s portrait may be devastating but it is also devastatingly funny making the play’s 3 1/2 hours speed by.
The 81-year-old Parsons gives a bravura performance as Violet, revelling in her utter vileness and exploring her character's full range from acidic lucidity to drug-induced haze. Cochran’s Barbara, who emerges as Violet’s main adversary, follows in her father’s footsteps descending from self-righteous activity to alcohol as a coping mechanism. To mention only these two is in some ways unfair to the amazing 13-member cast whose ensemble acting is a joy to behold. This huge, rumbustious play shows that while America may be disintegrating its drama is very much alive.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-06.
Photo: Estelle Parsons and Shannon Cochran. ©Robert J. Saferstein.
2009-11-06
August: Osage County