When the New York Times theater reviewers rave – life is good for any author and pride explodes in family and friends back home.  Such was the case as Barbara Santee wrote to the Oklahoma Women’s Network Blog about her cousin Billie Letts, author of “Where the Heart is” and Billie’s son Tracy. 

Tracy Letts has written a new play called “August: Osage County” that opened early this month in New York.  One of his previous plays was nominated for a Pulitzer several years ago and Barbara expects this play to go to London in the spring.  She attended the opening and reports, “It was one of the most thrilling events of my life.  There were celebrities, poparazzi, the whole shooting match, and a great after-party as we waited for the reviews.” 

NY Times writer Charles Isherwood loved the play and wrote so in glowing terms saying, “Its theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core.  Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD.  You will leave the Imperial Theater emotionally wrung out and exhausted from laughing, but you may still find yourself hungry for more.”

Isherwood notes that the play is set in “Pawhuska, near Tulsa” again proving to community critics that Tulsa is a regional city – recognized as such by national media.  He described the play’s premier as one that “blazed open.” 

The full review follows as first published in the New York Times.

December 5, 2007
THEATER REVIEW ‘AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY’

Mama Doesn’t Feel Well, but Everyone Else Will Feel Much Worse

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

All happy families are alike, Tolstoy told us, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But I’d bet the farm that no family has ever been as unhappy in as many ways — and to such sensationally entertaining effect — as the Westons of “August: Osage County,” the new play by Tracy Letts that blazed open last night at the Imperial Theater.

A fraught, densely plotted saga of an Oklahoma clan in a state of near-apocalyptic meltdown, “August” is probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Oh, forget probably: It is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Fiercely funny and bitingly sad, this turbo-charged tragicomedy — which spans three acts and more than three blissful hours — doesn’t just jump-start the fall theater season, recently stalled when the stagehands went on strike. “August” throws it instantaneously into high gear.

Mr. Letts, hitherto best known as the author of the crafty, blood-soaked genre pieces “Killer Joe” and “Bug,” somehow finds fresh sources of insight, humor and anguish in seemingly worn-to-the-stump material: the dysfunctional dynamics of the American family. In “August: Osage County” can be heard echoes of other classic dramas about the strangling grip of blood ties — from Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” — but Mr. Letts infuses his dark drama with potent energies derived from two more populist forms of American entertainment. The play has the zip and zingy humor of classic television situation comedy and the absorbing narrative propulsion of a juicy soap opera, too.

In other words, this isn’t theater-that’s-good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD. You will leave the Imperial Theater emotionally wrung out and exhausted from laughing, but you may still find yourself hungry for more.

“August” was first staged over the summer at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. That production, with a terrific cast superbly directed by Anna D. Shapiro, has been imported virtually wholesale for the Broadway run. Among the many pleasures the show affords is the chance to see actors largely unknown in New York — perhaps, most vitally, Deanna Dunagan, who plays an evil mom to end them all — take the city by storm with the harsh humor, ferocity and keen feeling of their performances.

Ms. Dunagan is Violet Weston, the razor-tongued matriarch of a family from Pawhuska, near Tulsa. Early on in the play, Violet’s husband of more than 30 years, a poet and former professor, mysteriously — or perhaps not so mysteriously — walks off into a sultry summer night, never to be heard from again. (The exhausted paterfamilias, Beverly, played with lovely wit and rue by the playwright’s father, Dennis Letts, opens the play with a lyrical dirge assessing the state of his marriage: “My wife takes pills, and I drink,” he says. “That’s the bargain we’ve struck.”)

The couple’s three adult daughters are called back to the family homestead, husbands or boyfriends in tow, to comfort Mother in her time of need, and try to get to the bottom of Dad’s disappearance. (Todd Rosenthal designed the tiered, haunted-house set, artfully strewn with shadows by the lighting designer Ann G. Wrightson.) All three offspring exhibit clear indications of past, present or future emotional damage.

The mousy Ivy (Sally Murphy), who lives nearby and resents the responsibility she’s had to take for watching over the horror of her parents’ latter years, has never married, although she is secretly carrying on a love affair with her mousy first cousin, belittlingly known to the family as Little Charles (Ian Barford). Barbara (Amy Morton), the oldest and strongest of the daughters, well armored in savage humor, returns from Colorado with her newly estranged husband, Bill Fordham (Jeff Perry), and their sardonic, pot-smoking teenage daughter, Jean (Madeleine Martin). The youngest Weston girl, Karen (Mariann Mayberry), arrives later, from Florida, spouting self-help platitudes about her recently rehabilitated love life, and accompanied by her oily businessman fiancé, Steve (Brian Kerwin).

Surrounded though Violet is by her extended family — which also includes her abrasive sister, Mattie Fae (a howlingly funny Rondi Reed), and Mattie Fae’s henpecked husband, Charlie (Francis Guinan) — she does not really seem to be a woman in great need of succor and support. Yes, she’s got cancer of the mouth. And a serious addiction to downers. She is often self-medicated to the point of incoherence, and prone to childish hysterics when crossed.

But Violet also possesses a spirit of aggression that a pro linebacker would envy, and a sixth sense for finding and exploiting the sore spots and secret hurts of everyone around her. For Violet, a child of poverty, neglect and abuse, the will to endure is inextricably tied up with the desire to fight and the need to wound. She can keep the blood in her own veins flowing only by drawing blood from others. (The play could almost be called “My Mother the Vampire.”)

And so, needlessly, pointlessly and endlessly, Violet sets about psychologically flaying her nearest and dearest, one by one, taking impotent revenge for the miseries of her life by picking at the scabs of everyone else’s.

The results are as harrowing as they are hilarious. Ms. Dunagan is simply magnificent in this fabulously meaty role. Such is the mesmerizing power of her performance that as Violet’s snake eyes scan the horizon for a fresh victim, claw-hand dragging a Winston to her grimly set mouth, you may actually find yourself sinking in your seat, irrationally praying that she doesn’t pick on you. (I was cowering myself.)

The cast does not have a weak link, and the other major female roles, in particular, are rewarding and perfectly played. (Only Ms. Martin and Mr. Kerwin, both excellent, are new to the production.) Ms. Murphy’s sad-eyed Ivy has a plaintive tenderness that occasionally flares up into a defensive assertion of the justice of her needs. Ms. Mayberry makes Karen’s drawly, long-winded narcissism oddly touching — you sense she’s still recovering from a lifetime of being talked over or ignored.

Ms. Reed flaps and squawks hilariously as the vulgar Mattie Fae, who shares with her sister a brazen heedlessness of other people’s feelings. Perhaps finest of all is Ms. Morton’s Barbara, who gradually — and frightfully — begins to metamorphose before our eyes into a boozing, brutalizing mirror image of her mother.