'August: Osage County' is 'King Lear' in slapstick - with a Cape Girardeau connection

By Robert W. Hamblin

My wife Kaye and I celebrated the recent Fourth of July weekend in New York City visiting Ground Zero, watching the fireworks display over the East River and touring the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We also took time out from these patriotic activities to attend a performance of "August: Osage County," the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play that many critics are saying is the most outstanding new play to appear on Broadway in the past three decades.

We were particularly excited to see the play because it has a Cape Girardeau -- as well as a personal -- connection. Tracy Letts, the author of the play, is the son of Dennis Letts, who taught in the English department at Southeast Missouri State University in the late 1960s. Tracy's mother, Billie Letts, was a student at the university at the same time. One of her classes was my class on the 20th-century American novel. When the Letts family left Cape Girardeau in 1968, Tracy, the now-famous playwright, was only 3 years old.

All of the Lettses went on to noteworthy achievements in their post-Cape Girardeau lives and careers. Billie is the author of four novels, one of which, "Where the Heart Is," became an Oprah's Book Club selection and was subsequently converted into a popular film.

Dennis, after working for several more years as a university professor and administrator in his native Oklahoma, eventually left education to become an actor, appearing in some 40 movies and capping his acting career, right up until his final illness and death this past February, with a role in his son's Broadway play.

Before writing "August: Osage County," Tracy had penned the scripts of two movies, "Killer Joe and Bug," and his post-August play, "Superior Donuts," which opened last month in Chicago.

Tracy's brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer living in Singapore.

During his time at Southeast, Dennis and I were close friends, discussing (and frequently arguing about) literature, teaching, politics and religion; playing golf together; and attending St. Louis Cardinals baseball games. Along with several other colleagues, Dennis resigned his position at Southeast in protest of the university's firing of eight faculty members. On the day he submitted his resignation I walked with him up the hill from the Grauel Building to Academic Hall, trying to persuade him to change his mind -- while he simultaneously sought to persuade me that I should join him in the protest resignation. Even today I don't know which of us held the more principled position on the issue, though it seems to me in hindsight that things worked out pretty well for both of us.

All of the praises and awards heaped upon "August: Osage County" had alerted Kaye and me, of course, to how great the play is. But nothing could have prepared us for the painful, gut-wrenching experience of sitting in the audience of the Music Box (an ironic name for the site of such a tragic play) and watching an American heartland family self-destruct before our very eyes. Perhaps it was the viewing of the play, arguably the harshest literary critique of the American Dream since Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," in the context of a Fourth of July celebration, but I have never before felt such discomforting and contradictory emotions at any theatrical performance.

Briefly stated, the plot of "August: Osage County" involves a family reunion of a contemporary Oklahoma family, the dysfunctional Westons: the alcoholic and nihilistic patriarch Beverly, a retired professor and erstwhile poet who disappears and subsequently dies, apparently from suicide (the role played until his incapacitating illness by Dennis Letts); the matriarch Violet, suffering from cancer and addicted to prescription drugs and sadistic rhetoric; their three middle-aged daughters (Barbara, unhappily married to a college professor who is having an affair with one of his students; Ivy, whom her mother suspects of being a lesbian but who is involved in an incestuous affair with a male relative; and Karen, whose self-delusion allows her to believe her latest fiance, who smokes pot, molests a teenage girl and has been married three times, is a "perfect man"); a 14-year-old granddaughter Jean, who smokes marijuana and prides herself on not being a virgin; plus a set of in-laws featuring a domineering woman who has emasculated and cuckolded her husband and constantly belittles her son. Given this summary, it is not surprising that one reviewer lists the cast of characters as "pill-poppers, potheads, bed-hoppers, cradle-robbers, suicides and drunks."

As the tragic story of a family in the process of collapse, "August: Osage County" has been favorably compared to such classic American plays as Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," Miller's "Death of a Salesman," Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" and Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." But the comparisons need not end with American drama. Letts's play also bears clear resemblances to Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex," Aeschylus' "Oresteia" and Shakespeare's "King Lear." This is lofty company for any playwright, especially a fledgling one, but most critics contend that Letts deserves to be in such company. (In all fairness, I should point out that the play is not without its detractors. One critic argues that the work is more akin to a serialized soap opera than to classic drama.)

What makes the pessimism and despair of the three-hour-long "August: Osage County" bearable to the audience is the wild, raucous humor of the dialogue, which has been compared to the zingy one-liners one hears in a television situation comedy. In this regard Letts's play reminds one of Henley's "Crimes of the Heart." As tragic as "August: Osage County" is, it is also, in places, hilariously funny. Considering the trials that have beset her family, Barbara says, "Thank God we can't tell the future, or we'd never get out of bed." After being told that Karen's fiance has been married three times, Violet says to him, quite seriously, "You ought to have it down pat by now." Trying to explain to Karen why she is so blind to the realities of her own and her family's situation, Barbara says, "You live in Florida." When her sisters wonder how their parents could have stayed married so long, Ivy says, "He killed himself." The almost continuous succession of funny rejoinders in a play of such sad and unrelenting bleakness creates a paradox that was surprising, even unique, for me. Throughout the lengthy dinner scene that is the second act of the play, in which Violet savagely humiliates, one by one, each member of the family, and which ends with Barbara's physically attacking her mother, I could not tell which tears in my eyes were from laughing and which from sobbing. It was a strange, inexplicable emotion -- one I had never experienced previously in any theater. It was like viewing "King Lear" in slapstick.

Despite its impressive humor, however, "August: Osage County" is ultimately a dark, despairing play about tortured characters and failed lives. And what makes it even more frightening is that one realizes, dimly from Beverly's lengthy opening speech but indisputably by Barbara's final one, that this is not a play about one family, the Westons, but about 21st-century America. These two speeches frame the action of the play, and Barbara's concluding comments serve as a gloss on her father's earlier remarks. Both, ironically, are spoken to Johnna Monevata, the Native American servant of the family, who, like Faulkner's Dilsey in the Compson household of "The Sound and the Fury," is both a symbol of historical injustice and the lone representative of a traditional standard of morality, decency and personal integrity against which all of the Westons are judged and found severely wanting.

In that opening speech (which is also his last) Beverly Weston commends to Johnna the poetry of T.S. Eliot, whose most famous and influential poem, "The Waste Land" (as Letts undoubtedly expects literate members of the audience to know), lamented the early 20th-century collapse of traditional values -- symbolized by the conflagration of World War I -- that left the Western world a spiritually vacant and sterile place. Significantly, however, the ending of Eliot's poem, in its image of thunder presaging the healing rain, holds out at least the possibility of spiritual rejuvenation and rebirth, and Eliot's later work reinforces his conviction that cultural reformation is possible through a return to traditional values -- values that Eliot personally identified with classical literature, conservative politics, and the Catholic Church. But Letts's play, written at the beginning of another century when America seems to so many once again to have lost its way, indeed its very soul, offers no such hope. In the stifling heat and dryness of Letts's Oklahoma August, the characters constantly fan themselves but find no relief. Religion, here satirized in the bitter humor of the overblown and largely irrelevant prayer of grace that is spoken as a prelude to the family dinner that quickly degenerates into savage vindictiveness and violence, is only a matter of words, not deeds -- as out of touch with reality as the bodily contortions of the family members as they stretch and strain to hold hands across the distance between the two separate dining tables.

Barbara's final speech recalls her father's loss of faith -- in self, family and country. Concerning the last, Barbara remembers that her father had once said that the United States had always been a "whorehouse" but now had become "a pile of ----." He added, "Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm," and the response of the nation's citizens to the crisis is similar to that observable in his marriage: "My wife takes pills, and I drink. That's the bargain we've struck." And by the time anyone figures out that the final collapse and destruction are imminent, it is too late to remedy the situation. The play ends with Barbara, like her sisters and relatives before her, walking out the door, leaving her sick, nearly helpless mother to fall into the arms of her servant, lamenting over and over, "It's all gone. It's all gone. It's all gone." It is little wonder that Kaye and I found the play so disturbing on our nation's birthday.

Yet there is more, something much more positive, to the story of the play. If the text of "August: Osage County" is troubling and despairing, the history of the play is quite something else. It was written by a playwright whose previous work would scarcely have predicted a play as sensational as this. It was first produced by Steppenwolf, a small community theater group in Chicago. After a successful run there, it was moved, with its original cast intact, to New York, where it has been honored with extraordinary critical praise and coveted prizes, including Tony awards for the play, two of its actresses, its director, and its scenic designer. And Dennis Letts, formerly of Cape Girardeau, had the blessed privilege during the final weeks of his life -- even as he received chemotherapy for his fatal cancer -- to perform a role on Broadway created by his son. If the text of "August: Osage County" is a cautionary tale of the American Dream that may have already become the American nightmare, the history of the success of the play suggests that the American Dream is still very much alive and possible. Both of these facts made viewing the play on a Fourth of July weekend a memorable, and thought-provoking, experience.

Robert W. Hamblin is professor of English and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.