August: Jackson County

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, especially one that parades its exaggerated extremities in front of me for three and a half hours.

August: Osage County

Jerry Springer, meet Tracy Letts. You two should have a lot to talk about – you both have a penchant for dysfunctional white families.

But seriously, the Old Globe performance of August: Osage County was an absolute delight as far as production goes. Kimberly Guerrero gave my spine a shudder the way she stared (spoiler alert!) at Angela Reed after Angela’s character Barbara struck her child. And Lois Markle owned the role of Violet and the Old Globe! That woman has a pair of pipes that can fill up the theater and suck all the energy to her. That’s what Violet does: she sucks all the energy out of everybody in the house and makes them as miserable as she is.

And Sam Gold’s direction took me on a journey! They played for laughs in the first two acts, and laugh I did. Not even Jerry or Maury can get the same kinds of hearty guffaws and mischievous chuckles out of an audience. The third act was an about-face. It all of a sudden got pretty serious. Unfortunately, it was too long. I was with them up through the point that (spoiler alert!) Bill leaves with Jean. That seemed like the ending, and I was surprised when they kept going. I didn’t get back into it again until Violet told Ivy (played by Carla Harting; also, this is another spoiler) that she was banging her brother. If it hadn’t been for the middle of the third act, the entire event would have been an incredible journey. As it was, it was an incredible journey with a disappointing hint of self-indulgence on the part of the playwright.

Now that we’re talking about Tracy Letts again, we’d better address some fundamental issues with his script. His treatment of the Other and Indians seems lazy, which makes his script feel like a Jerry Springer-type attack on a created family, and nothing more. The play is about a dysfunctional white Oklahoma family, but he inserts into their world an Indian. Johnna Monevata seems well-balanced, but is she? The last scene of the Old Globe production made me question why she stays in such a hell. She read like a vulture. But is she? Is that in the script, or just the production? What Tracy does is he introduces two Others for his predominately white audience: the dysfunctional white family, and the Indian. Racially, his audience should feel alienated from Johnna, but psychologically from the Westons. Or should they? Tracy gives himself a lot to work with by picking an Indian as the interloper into the Westons’ world, but he then he gets lazy. Why doesn’t he deal with the Cheyenne’s troubled history in Oklahoma, something that should be on the forefront of all the characters’ minds? More importantly, why doesn’t he delve deeper into the question of the Other, represented in this play by a brutally self-destructive family and by an Indian interloper? By allowing Johnna to be a greater player in this world, rather than the dark-skinned maid servant of traditional colonial theater, he could make this play more than Jerry Springer style sadism. He could make it a play about the role of the Other in modern Indian-white relations, as well as about the Other within ourselves. His play could mean something.