Theatre Review: ‘August: Osage County’ at Keegan Theatre

(L-R): Susan Marie Rhea, Karen Novack, Rena Cherry Brown, Belen Pifel. Photo byy C Stanley Photography.

Any play set in Oklahoma’s prairies that opens in the dark with an incongruous quotation from the Anglophile Thomas Stearns Eliot is either seriously misguided, too cruel for August (or April), or an absurdist farce of mythic proportions. Fortunately for Keegan Theatre and the packed house in attendance at Tuesday’s Press Night all three premises are false, yet strangely, superbly true.

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner for Best Play, and it’s easy to see why. The play tackles the big questions, as so few dramas do on the American stage. And it’s those big questions that justify the three and a half hours that it takes to tell this epic tale.

(L-R): Charlie Abel, Lyndsay Rini, Karen Novack. Photo by C. Stanley Photography.

Originally premiering at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the play possesses all of the darkness and savagery that have become Steppenwolf’s trademarks. It is a deeply visceral exploration of “the plain,” that curious disease that afflicts the sober during times of reflection; Letts’ three-act family saga leaves no emotional stone unturned as it digs to the core of contemporary America’s obsession with self. No one is spared, most importantly not the audience, as you are guaranteed to leave the theatre knowing that the play will haunt you for a long time.

In a nutshell, the Weston family’s father and renowned poet, Beverly (wryly played by Stan Shulman), disappears, which brings the three Weston daughters back home. Together, these events generate an upheaval of family dynamics that reveals much of the dysfunction, brutality, and greed that has motivated the family’s identity for over forty years.

Foreground- Rena Cherry Brown, with (L-R) Lyndsay Rini, Shadia Hafiz, Colin Smith, Susan Marie Rhea, Eric Lucas. Photo by C. Stanley Photography.

Instead of centering the play around the family patriarch, however, Letts organizes his tale around the family matriarch, Violet, played with mind-stinging waspishness by two-time Helen Hayes Award-winner Rena Cherry Brown. Addicted to a slew of prescription painkillers, she enters the stage resembling a bitter Mary Tyrone, eventually advancing to rival Martha of Edward Albee fame, before finally launching herself into the stars. Ms. Brown’s performance is brilliant: at times you’ll feel sorry for her; at other times, you’ll want to kill her off; in the end, however, you’ll just hope she’ll move to the next county like a plague of locusts.

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