August: Osage County

August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' fourth play, won both the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. Letts has been an actor and playwright with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and his fifth play, Superior Donuts, is already on the boards there.

Letts specializes in plays about violent persons in drastic situations and has a terrific ear for both regional and character-specific dialogue. But August: Osage County has an additional, unique distinction: In an era of undernourished, 90-minute wonders, it staunchly takes up three and a half hours of extended-family clashes, hovering over the realm of melodrama but saved from it by deeper insight, more complex characters, smarter dialogue, and no dearth of (admittedly dark) humor.

Letts' Pulitzer was certainly well-deserved; for the Tony, I would have given a slight edge to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll. Stoppard, however, won last year (for The Coast of Utopia, a longer but lesser effort), and Letts is American. Where homegrown talent is this indisputable in our gifted-dramatist-starved country, a tiny bit of favoritism is surely justified.

What kind of play is this? Be it said right off that as well as it plays, it reads no less winningly. That is no small achievement. A whole lot of plays can do only the one or the other. So even if you enjoyed Osage onstage—to say nothing of those who haven't seen it—new-found pleasure will be had from reading it. No redundancy in acquiring the book.

[IMG:R]One critic sanguinely opined that this is what Eugene O'Neill would have written in 2007. Well, it is also pretty much what O'Neill wrote back then. Also what Aeschylus had written in the Oresteia some time before. No need even to invoke Tolstoy in claiming that dysfunctional families come in infinite, absorbing variety, especially when dysfunction takes on epic dimensions. We get here suicide, incipient incest, barely foiled pedophilia, dementia-inducing pill popping, cancer of the mouth, murderous greed, generational infighting and two marriages venomous enough for an Albee play.

Yet somehow it all manages to hang together, rightly wrenching in one place and no less rightly hilarious in another. Or both together. For sheer, concise devastation, take this bit between estranged spouses, Bill and Barbara, coming after a violent clash between Barbara and their teenage daughter, Jean:

BILL: You and Jean have about forty years to fight and make up.
BARBARA (Confused): Why, what happens in forty years?
BILL: You die.
BARBARA: Oh, right.
BILL: I mean—
BARBARA: No. Right.
BILL: If you're lucky.
BARBARA: Says you.
BILL: If we're lucky.

Note how brilliantly and succinctly this manages to be both frightening and funny. And it is part of a longer sequence that sustains its humor and horror with the same skill.

There are further strengths. Being partly about literary-academic family members, the play includes some literary references, but apt and not too many. Letts fully characterizes even lesser roles, each with the appropriate style of speech. The three-level, multi-room set accommodates simultaneous actions or allows focus to shift excitingly from area to area. Best of all, perhaps, is how things are not unduly spelled out—an open-endedness that gets the viewer or reader imaginatively involved, guessing what might happen after the final curtain. For these characters couldn't be more lifelike, and their lives go on in our fantasy, try as we might to uproot them.

Another plus is the great performances elicited—under Tony winner Anna D. Shapiro's fine direction—for the eye and ear, or the mind's eye and inner ear of a sensitive reader. Acting Tonys deservedly went to two cast members, bypassing the best: Amy Morton's Barbara. If reading the script stimulates you to visit or revisit the Broadway production, by all means try to do so while Morton is still in it. For this show will have a run beyond any performer's availability, just as the book will demand rereading beyond most other play texts.