Review: "August: Osage County" serves up dark comedy
If a well-performed exploration of themes raised by poets such as T.S. Eliot is worth marinating yourself in three hours of dysfunction, depravity, denial and despair, then “August: Osage County” is where you need to be.
This award-winning play, written by Tracy Letts and directed (and briefly acted) by George Judy for Swine Palace Productions at LSU’s Reilly Theatre, is often described as darkly comedic, which is a bit like saying the Grand Canyon is somewhat eroded. If comedy ever comes any darker, theatergoers will be issued metaphorical miner’s helmets so they can detect it.
There are some genuinely funny moments in “August,” and lots more if you, like a goodly number of the college students attending on Wednesday, find the f-word in its many forms to be absolutely hilarious.
The play, set in northeastern Oklahoma, opens in the study of the Weston family’s three-story home, created with fantastic detail as a set that allows the story to move seamlessly to various parts of the house. Beverly Weston (played by Judy) is a once-famous poet who is interviewing Johnna (Jessica Jain), a Native American woman, to serve as cook and live-in assistant to help care for his wife, Violet (Cristine McMurdo-Wallis), who has — in a delicious irony — cancer of the mouth. Beverly freely acknowledges his fondness for drink, and Violet’s addiction to pain medicine. Johnna takes the job, and Beverly lends her a book of Eliot’s poetry.
The scene abruptly moves forward a few weeks. Beverly has disappeared, and the entire family starts to assemble to help Violet. And what a family it is. Violet’s sister, Mattie Fay Aiken (Bacot Wright), has no filter between thought and tongue that might disguise her crudeness, and her husband, Charlie (Gregory Leute), and son, Little Charles (Jason Bayle), have long been cowed into submission. Then, there are the Weston daughters: Ivy (Kristina Sutton), who has never married and has stayed close to home to care for a mother she can’t please; Barbara Fordham (Michele Guidry), who lives in Colorado with her cheating husband, Bill (Drew Battles), and their marijuana-smoking 14-year-old daughter, Jean (Katrina Despain); and self-absorbed Karen (Jenny Ballard), who can’t talk or think about anything but her upcoming marriage to Steve Heidebrecht (Anthony McMurray), who doesn’t take long to show signs of being a cad.
You can already imagine how joyous this reunion is going to be, can’t you? It almost doesn’t matter when Beverly turns up dead, drowned in an apparent suicide. This train wreck has already left the station.
The center of all of this is Violet, who may or may not have been a decent human being when not simultaneously sick, bereaved and strung out on pills, but now she is exceedingly mean and spiteful, and begins pulling the scabs off of her family’s old wounds and revealing its secrets. McMurdo-Wallis portrays Violet with a performance worthy of Bette Davis, creating a character worthy of both loathing and pity.
To a lesser extent, the same can be said of most of this sad family. The men are all, to some degree, weak or vile or both. The women are all coping badly with the family’s dysfunctions. The signs that something redemptive might happen, such as when Charlie finally finds a backbone are few. Johnna, the outsider, offers a degree of sanity, but she knows her place and only steps in when absolutely necessary.
The entire cast makes its characters believable, and Guidry carries much of the play as Barbara, who tries to be strong amidst the family destruction that attacks her from all sides. Leute also stands out in portraying the mostly weak Charlie, who uses humor to deflect the barbs and deflate the tension that is so palpable in the Weston house.
If Letts is trying to say something meaningful about the state of the American family, it isn’t apparent. The Westons seem to have no spiritual, political or traditional underpinnings that could give their lives meaning. Their world, and this play, ends not with a bang but a whimper.