| IS "AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY" THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN PLAY?
by Jason Loewith on 8/08/2007 02:35:00 PM
I had the good fortune last night to see Tracy Letts' new play AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY at Steppenwolf. The show has gotten a lot of heat and a lot of praise, and a number of subscribers and colleagues have said to me, "I can't wait for you to see it so I can hear what you think!" [Some of you know that Tracy's first play, KILLER JOE, had its world premiere at Next in 1993 (I had nothing to do with it; all credit's due to the wonderful Dexter Bullard, former director of the Next Theatre Lab).] So I'm happy to weigh in on the big question:
Is AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY the next Great American Play?
Short answer: I'm not sure yet, but I'm leaning towards YES. Our Great American Plays tend to be family plays, so imagine a continuum from OUR TOWN through DEATH OF A SALESMAN, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, BURIED CHILD, and FENCES. I don't know if AUGUST deserves a place on that list yet - that's history waiting to be written - but does the play boldly point the way towards a new of thinking about American drama? Possibly. Will it be remembered as a significant milestone in our theater? Probably. Is it comparable to the last 12 Pulitzer Prizewinning plays? Absolutely. And better than many of them.
Long answer: Let's face it: as theater artists, we're a bit in the wilderness right now. I can't think of any play since ANGELS IN AMERICA (the Pulitzer-winner in 1993) that's both told us who we are as a culture and pointed a way forward. (There are plenty of plays that do a good job of telling us who we are - or who a portion of us are - as a culture: look at the twelve Pultizer Prizewinners that came after it.) Whatever gets called the "Next Great American Play" better do both: it better tell us who we are as Americans, and show us what might lie ahead. As Bart Sher, Artistic Director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle (and director of LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA) told me:
Maybe it’s more recent, and maybe it’s over the last two years, but I do think that there’s an exhaustion about where America might feel like it is. We’re exhausted by the struggle between the right and the left, we see no clear sense of where we’re going, and there need to be more artists engaging the question of who we are right now to take us to some next place. It’s in kind of this “held state”, late in the Bush Administration, where we really don’t know who we are as Americans anymore because we’ve been so damaged by the struggle from 1990 to now, between the right and the left, it’s had a very devastating impact on the culture. And people are holding on, and people have deep belief and faith, but it’s not so guaranteed.
That's where artists are incredibly important. Artists are growing and developing communities, and finding more and more of who they are. But there’s no guarantee, if they don’t go back to those communities and work, if they don’t keep investing in what they’re making, if they don’t keep experimenting and trying things, if they don’t keep hoping for something to lift into to a bigger place... there's no guarantee the culture will survive.
So, does AUGUST tell us who we are as a culture, and does it point the way forward?
For the first 3 and a 1/4 hours of AUGUST last night, I was convinced I was in the presence of a remarkable feat of the former... that the play - perfectly cast, forcefully acted, directed with exceptional deftness and written with astonishing wit and intelligence and sensitivity - was one of the best dysfunctional-family plays I'd seen. And that's great, and that's all it needs to be for me to say to everyone that they oughta get out and see it before it closes.
But I wasn't sure it had anything to say about what lay ahead until the last 15 minutes. And at that point, for me, the character Violet Weston (embodied by the amazing Deanna Dunegan) became a metaphor for America right now. Strong to a fault, exercising her power because of the hardships she'd suffered as a child, and now dramatically, desperately alone. Her ability to exercise absolute power over her family led to a moral slippage, an almost tragic slippage, that she could not halt. When Letts has Violet retreat in the final moments of the play into the waiting arms of Johnna, the Cheyenne housekeeper - who embodies a simultaneous spirituality and utter clarity of purpose: she's there for the paycheck - it felt like a sucker-punch to the gut. Johnna accepts Violet for the flawed and ultimately vulnerable woman she is... but does she do it just for the paycheck?
I guess I've seen enough theater (and film, and television, and art, and on and on) in the past few years telling me that we're a culture in crisis - that we can't solve the rift between left and right, between greed and charity, between fear and strength. I already know that. So a play like THE PAIN AND THE ITCH (also at Steppenwolf, and also a play I truly loved) addresses those issues beautifully, hilariously, and dangerously - but ultimately doesn't tell me something new.
Something about AUGUST felt new to me, though. I'm still trying to figure out if it's a cautionary tale or if it points the way forward more optimistically, but I do think Letts has accomplished something rare. He has engaged me emotionally and intellectually on that most familiar of topics - the family - and made me feel like it was a metaphor for what it means to be an American right now, and what it might mean in the future.
I'm eager to hear your thoughts.Labels: Chicago theatre, Fame
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jason, i agree with you on so much of this. i felt strangely optimistic at the end of AUGUST because it felt like the play was encouraging a brand of brutal honesty that is not only new to most over-advertised/over-lied-to Americans, but is ultimately cathartic. it feels good to admit fault, it feels good to speak the awful painful truth. it feels new for once. the brutality of that family was never a lie. and, to me, that really meant something.
and, as for that final moment (does the servant genuinely care? is she just doing it for money?), i felt it was genuine. very genuine. though, i could have just seen it poorly; i was crying pretty hard by that point.
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