Times Square is a scary place between Thanksgiving and New Year's, for the obvious reasons: it's a bottleneck of tourists, buskers, cars, blinking LCD screens (not too many light bulbs left), and all manner of forced holiday cheer. Dodging past this leads one to the Imperial Theatre for "August: Osage County", the new play by Steppenwolf ensemble member Tracy Letts that just landed in New York after its successful run at Chicago's Steppenwolf this summer.
What better way for weary shoppers to rest their feet than with a three-hour play about a dysfunctioning Oklahoman family? Scheduled to begin its run in late November but delayed because of the Broadway stagehands' strike, "August: Osage County" finally opened this week.
The play would be out of place in any candy-cane-clogged location, but it stands in even larger contrast to the Great White Way in December. But "August" is more than just a purgative for all the Grinches and Rockettes—its a full meal of feeling instead of sugar plum merriment.
A Steppenwolf production on Broadway generates a lot of buzz, but this show is a particularly exciting and risky import. The company's last show to receive a Broadway run was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 2001, an adaptation of an American classic with bankable star Gary Sinise in the lead. "August," on the other hand, is the playwright's Broadway debut and features a cast of exceptionally talented but relatively unknown actors.
The plot centers around three generations of the Weston family, reunited after the disappearance and later death of the family's alcoholic patriarch, Beverly. His wife Violet, a pill addict, gathers the family around her and in time all sorts of family secrets and suppressed animosities are exposed. It's a play about how the past creates the present, how blood ties can be irrevocably undone through malice, how people can both need and repulse each other.
The Chicago run of "August" was a thrilling event for anyone who saw it. Letts combined some of the verbal pyrotechnics of his plays "Killer Joe" and "Bug" with the contemplative themes and emotional depth of "Man from Nebraska." The writing was vitriolic and dark but amped up to the point of absurdity and humor. Director Anna Shapiro and the actors, many of them members of the Steppenwolf ensemble, created a generous collection of subtle performances.
Even the scenic design, a skeletonized cross-section of a three-tiered house, was perfectly in tune with the script, direction and acting. Would the move to a much larger Broadway house destroy the intimacy of the original production and sap it of its strength? Would "August: Osage County" keep its Chicago chops?
Fortunately, the production retains most of the power of the original. Few noticeable changes have been made to the script. The cast members (almost all of whom were in the Chicago production) balance each other well, and both Deanna Dunagan as the Weston family matriarch and Amy Morton as her eldest daughter again deliver fantastic performances. Neither the acting nor the set is swallowed up in the bigger venue. But, still, shifts in tone changed the show in its transfer to Broadway.
There is a different feeling, a different vibe, to this "August: Osage County." The show has a lot of humor in it, but it's of the pitch-black varitey, so every line and gesture should be tinged with an anger simmering just under the surface. The audience at the Imperial was primed for entertainment, not contemplation. Jokes were greeted with louder and longer laughs; confrontations were punctuated by gasps and applause.
All of this highlighted, or made more obvious, the punch lines and peaks at the expense of nuance. In Chicago, the Weston family cut each other with razors; in New York, they beat each other with cudgels.
Kevin Byrne is a Metromix special contributor.
Originally published Dec. 6, 2007.
