Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is going viral all over the country, but should it? I wondered if I would get more out of it if I saw it again, in the same way you would expect to get more out of a Shakespeare play when you see it the second and fifteenth times. After all, people seem to be treating August as a new classic.
I can’t see why.
I could complain about the acting. After all, the Old Globe had a stirring class, but OSF’s ensemble fell short of what I’ve come to expect from that company. I am, naturally, thinking of the two productions that I’ve seen a week apart together. The OSF cast was doing everything that actors should: projecting, keeping their cues tight. But it didn’t seem organic. I failed to invest in the characters, and I failed to laugh at their outrageousness. What happened was that they ended up playing it at the same level and tempo throughout the first act, and it was fairly clear to me that they were acting. I should qualify this review right now by saying that I only made it through the first act. I figured if I was going to be bored until midnight, I could at least do it in my bed, asleep.
I could be alone in this. It seems I am: everybody I talk to enthuses about August, and the audience I was a part of was pretty lively. This makes me think that the acting didn’t read as stagey to the rest of the audience as it did to me. They genuinely seemed to be into it. So why wasn’t I? Could it be that I just heard these jokes a week ago, and so they seemed old? And if that’s the case, then it tells me that August is superficial: there’s nothing under the surface.
Others disagree with that opinion. Director Christopher Liam Moore indicates in his program note that he’s fascinated by the focus on family. He posits that “there is a little bit of the Westons in each of our families.” But if this were the case, then I should be able to invest a little bit more. As it turns out, I just have no reason to care about a dysfunctional white family living in Oklahoma
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