August: Osage County
Writer: Tracy Letts
Director: Eamon Flack
Belvoir Street Theatre
November 9 – December 15, 2024
Belvoir’s excellent production of Tracy Letts’ Tony and Pulitzer awarded masterpiece is an engrossing tragicomedy with a brilliant ensemble cast.
Eamon Flack’s direction of this brilliant script is admirable, managing to keep the various subplots and intermingling action clear and understandable. This is assisted by the simplified set (Bob Cousins) showing a ramshackle clapboard homestead evoking the Midwest character of the play’s setting.
The story follows the dysfunctional history of the Weston family. Beverly Weston (John Howard), the family patriarch, was once a noted poet, but age and alcoholism has reduced him to a shambolic shadow of his former self. At play’s opening he is interviewing a young Cheyenne girl (Bee Cruse) for a live-in domestic position and as carer for his narcotics-addicted wife, Violet (Pamela Rabe), who can be heard moaning and screaming in the background.
It is high summer in the Midwest and the depressed Beverly goes off on an apparent fishing trip but commits suicide by drowning. Violet’s mean-spirited, contentious nature has estranged her family but with the loss of their father, she calls on them to gather around her.
As the various family members arrive, we gain insight into their fractured relationships and family skeletons get hauled out of cupboards. Barbara (Tamsin Carroll), Violet’s eldest daughter, married to Bill (Bert LaBonté), is bent on hiding her impending separation and is in constant conflict with her mother; Ivy (Amy Mathews), the middle daughter, is constantly being criticised for being single; Karen (Anna Samson), the flighty youngest daughter, arrives with Steve (Rohan Nichol), a somewhat sleazy character, whom she announces she will be marrying. Mattie Fae (Helen Thomson), big-haired and opinionated, is Violet’s sister. She constantly berates and belittles her husband and son, Charles (Greg Stone) and Little Charles (Will O’Mahony).
The family’s fortunes are an illustration of the failed American dream. From hardscrabble beginnings some of the family rose to middle class status, but that achievement is gradually being eroded by personal choices or social circumstances.
At the post-funeral dinner any show of familial cohesion begins to unravel. Violet, high on her drugs and wanting to make a show of matriarchal power, sets about insulting and embarrassing each person at the table under the pretence of “truth-telling”. Barbara is infuriated and confiscates her pills, yelling “I’m in charge now!” The dinner ends in comical chaos, with trays of food being slung around the set.
Further ruckus ensues when Steve, Karen’s sleazy boyfriend, makes advances to Jean (Esther Williams), Barbara’s teenage daughter, but is foiled by Johnna who hits him with a shovel. This is a “last straw” for everyone and they all scatter to their own homes. Violet sinks to the floor, alone in her addiction and despair, while Johnna, almost a ghostly presence, meanders pensively across the stage.
Pamela Rabe and John Howard are outstanding in this world-class performance, as are all the actors in this ensemble, each delivering a well-rounded, believable character.
The sober themes are lightened by dark humour throughout, and despite the three-hour-plus length it is completely engrossing – an excellent end-of-year offering by Belvoir and really should not be missed!
