Theatre: August: Osage County

August: Osage County, by Tracey Letts
MTC @ Playhouse Theatre
Sat. 23 May to Sat. 4 Jul.

Oyez! This play is really good. It is well established that this play is really good:

it satisfies a palpable hunger for big theatrical experiences
it received near unanimous praise from [American] critics
and it is one of only six plays to win the triple crown of American playwriting: the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

Oyez! This production, at the MTC, is also really good. It is well established that this production is really good:

it is a brilliant example of this kind of well-made theatre
it lives up to the plaudits it has garnered as one of the most compelling dramas of recent times
the brilliance of this play is due to the fact that everything just works

And it’s true, true, true. Though, there have been reservations, of course: [...]

[it is] many critics noted blatantly derivative
it [does not possess] the penetrating truth or the revelatory originality of a fully achieved work of art
[it] ends up as mechanism rather than masterpiece

But even of such reservations there is little left to tell; the play

is necessarily derivative because family is the leitmotif of American theatre

so if any has their thunder yet to tell, then she must—

tell it to bare walls, tell it to the plains,
mention in passing to the plains
as they at last recline

for all straight-horned criticism has by now been mustered; anything more must be scholarship

or something else.

I encourage anyone who hasn’t seen A:OC and wants to see big, clever, main-stage theatre, brilliantly acted by all thirteen cast members, epic in its labour hours and collaborative effort, to cycle down to the Art Centre and sneak in during first interval.

What’s left? Must I quizzle?

“Ah, but, my dear,” complained the sleek patron, row ell, seat five, “you didn’t think that Johnna’s refrain I need the work was, what shall I say, counterfeit? Her constant presence … snide? No? Very snide, I thought.”

Or Mr Catchpole, Mr Rialto Catchpole, a young man but recently in double-breasted suits, “The direction was able, very able, but, ma’am, no. No. I will not go so far as perfect. Recall, if you please, good woman, toward the end of the first act, Barbara announces: My father is dead, Bill! It was too blatant, I think, by Mr Phillips. I would have had it casual-like, spoken to the pillow, not the stalls, because, you know, convention has its limits.”

But I’ll not sift this red sand. Toss me a lens, any cracked old lens, and let us sight this thing by another medium.

Berverly Weston: I don’t know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

This is a strong beginning. But Beverly is the only character to whom such poetic projections are given:

Cedars and the Weston sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Crowd in upon us all.

And he is too brief. The rest of the family, the family as an act, a familiar act, is too positively known:

Every character gets his [sic] pathological revelation, fearful or funny or simultaneously both.

Alas, for family is an unknown county. It is not meant to be understood / you understand. Yet Beverly Weston, patriarch, is the only one we do not understand to a complete extent–alack, for such

songs are not meant to be understood you understand
They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

We know too well / the other Westons. They are cross-sectioned in their grand cross-sectioned house (by Dale Ferguson’s industrial razor). Coming after Beverly are the sisters: [T]hese three sisters would be Chekhov’s worst nightmare [MTC]. And they would; they really, really would. Of someone else’s Chekhov, sing:

And then he sings, A Fig for You, which is one of these weird Chekhov things and he exits.

Weird, like Chekhov’s families—and if you said, but not American families, I’d know you wanted Quizzling. All families / all world / are weird.

This Osage Covey is a mess, but I do not think them mysteriously weird. They are not then a real family, in feeling, for nobody does a fing is not explained for the purposes of large denouement:

Upon learning that the sister was in love with her brother, / and that the father had an affair with the aunt, / and that the youngest granddaughter was smitten with the fiancé / of a different sister / the broad-face Australian / shook his head / guffawed / and cried in media res / / “Mad as rabbits!” / And slapped his knee, enchanted.

I am Charles, the little man who smokes and smokes
I am Jean, the little girl who does know but better
I am Steve, the king of the pool
I am Little Charles, so wise I had my mouth sewn shut
I am Mattie Fae, a woman who takes jokes
I am Violet, the enemy of the mind.

This play asks, constantly, for us to see more, to understand and diminish:

Come & diminish me, & map my way. [13]

How can drama be a trepid thing if we are shown the the deep-laid map so clear? We want your damn thickets dense. Is this not the Mid-West?

Barbara: Hey, please, this is not the mid-west. Michigan is the mid-west, God knows why. The Plains are a state of mind. Some spiritual affliction. Like the blues.
Steve: “You ok?” “I’m fine. I just got the plains.”

Then where is your mesquite? Your impenetrable mesquite? This family has no private allusions, private jokes, private language, and even only a skeletal private life. (Obligatory: it’s in the closet.) Everything is seen from the inside out. Everything is studied as cause and effect. Beverly might have suggested, as the drama here unfolded, that Life, friends, is boring; we must not say so. But, as I say, his stay is brief.

Beverley: We keep unusual hours here. We try not to differentiate between night and day.

Twilight. Papered windows.

Let’s go with that, let’s make the thing still more obscure. Let us paper those windows of perception with another text.

The honey dusk sprawl.

Begin, Beverly, character of deep potential, a man of eternally plump hope, excerpted from the play’s tone entirely

—the play began so well:
I mentioned family things, she waved them away,
I sloshed out a martini [55]—

his energy evaporates, displaced by that domesticated Eliot, Johnna Monevata, the young bird with the glossy tongue.

There is no sense of his haunting the house. To this absence I relate the play’s complacent effection of familial terror. His, Beverley’s, spirit, indeed, one senses, is pleased to be free of the house and the junk therein:

Beverly: Feel free to use anything, every THING all this garbage we’ve acquired, our life’s work. If you’re going to live here, I want you to LIVE here.

But I want him back. I make of him a critical revenant, to re-introduce the elder elephant of APORIA—

With them all again & again I died
and cried, and I have to live [36]

—to translate—with more wonder—the intended “strong sense of impending nightmare” (oh, there I go, intention once again!). The lurching drunkard-poet’s ghost might have shone things more strangely, disrupting the household formula that Letts deploys—disruption being the bestest curative for “classic middle-class liberal’s pity” / a disorder I don’t comprehend / (what is this “water”?).

What? America. Then and now, big themes: the father, mother, child; love, women, sex; citizen, teacher, artist, scholar. Independence. Freedom.

Topos one, the family, theatre’s own Orage County. The light: though the windows are papered over, there is still too much of it:

Families have seldom been so understood

But I would prefer us to perform in complete darkness. [67]

Twilight it is, then. The Ladies emerge, and

so, as I say, the house is givin hell

Nevin and Menelaus (outstanding names, all things considered), who lead, respectively, Violet and Barbara out from under everything, except themselves, start to chew the scenery, throwing plates, invective,

When she make a very big sound—after, well,
no sound—I see she totterin—I cross which stage
even at Henry’s age

in 2-3 seconds

The other girls–Arena, Stone, Rubenstein and even little Jones–reveal themselves all, in one way or another, Violaceous, of the Violet family, fearing each

the horror of unlove. [74]

But it is Barbara, Bellona, primogenitur, chief among them who craves

Every least part of that infernal & unconscious
[…] pain.

Steve: I think you’re wrong. I think you get in this masochistic frame of mind that actually desires to be hurt.

In such a world, yearning for love-pain, a yearning causing, cruelly, Beverly to yearn for

a most marvellous … piece

—Mattie Fae insists that she was a marvellous piece, once,—

of luck …

to die. [26]

—drifted off upstairs,
downstairs, somewheres [18]

away from that “disagreeable compound of arrogance, selfishness, and impatience”, the mother.

Violet is violent, of course, but Nevin more so. Mothers!, yup, I figure you is bad powers, of course, of course.

Horrible even when, deprived of her enemy for support—

Beverly That is a bargain we’ve struck, just one paragraph in our marriage contract, that cruel covenant.

He broke the contract. But she keeps standing, keeps foaming, fighting.

The way she says, I’m Violet. What’s your name? to Johnna in the opening scene, brazen, slurred, like a hulking barroom thug, not a shrunken women, small and mad and cunning, the best the tradition of that type.

Hard is her way

Hard on the land wears the strong sea
And empty grows every bed.

Until the house is truly empty, cleared of the feeding girls and unfortunate men. Except for Johnna. Why Johnna? Well—

Hurl, God who found
us in this, down
something … we hear the more
sin has increast, the more
grace has been found to abound. [20]

Only, this is not human, this “Johnna”, despite–

Jean: It feels like there’s something in it.
Johnna: Mmm. My umbilical cord
[...]
And if we lose it, then our souls belong nowhere and after we die our souls will walk the earth trying to find a place to belong.

–she still, here, umbilical proof aside, does not seem very human.

It’s not hard to forgive a little violence against poor Johnna. She, after all, is the figure which stands between us and death. She obstructs direct confrontation with death. She is typical of A:OC’s unwillingness to directly confront its themes. She is a theatrical device—and device becomes the end, quite literally, in this play.

Beverley was the best hope for real confrontation, but his confrontation was final and early.

Device was thereafter elaborated on a schedule, like a formal procession:

I myself walked at the funeral of tenderness.
Followed by other deaths

of love—of hope (the family we learn, insists on exogamy), but not temptation

—I’m not so young, but not so very old. [3]

The procession brings

Spry disappointments of men
and vicing adorable children
miserable women, [74]

that I now mastered, having access, being departed, to the secret bits of life. Who could hate the slick man, Steve Heidebrecht (Taylor), for that compact & delicious body that he covets

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against him
—Mr Bones, there is [4]

Everybody could.

Query this covetous generation, epigone of the Greats: the narcissists. I observe them now as a not disappointed father might observe—

Charles [to Little Charles]: Now some of them haven’t gotten the chance to see what I see: a kind man, very loving with a lot to offer.

So take another look—

There is an eye, there was a slit

And through it … Dancing mice. My daughters three, / their husbands, lovers, brothers, see.

Above whom, the mother’s wand, a shotgun. An important theme: the narcissist’s burden is a heavy one; the narcissist’s master, cruel. But they’re all so strong they carry it lightly. And make some “damned serious humour” from the mother’s addiction and the sister’s incest and the granddaughter’s molestation &c. &c.

(Though it all appalls The Plains, apparently).

—You like politics, pal? —Pal, politics. [51]
—Whose gonna win, pal?
—Pal, I wouldn’t predict.
But I do guess most peoples gonna lose [60]

Charles: you mean I’ve been eating fear—what?—three times a day for fifty-seven-odd years?

Violet: Where’s the meat? Where’s the meat? Where’s the meat?

Charles: Fear never tasted so good.
Steve: Right, right. It’s pretty good once you get used to the taste.
Barbara: I’ve seen her eat a cheeseburger every now and then.
Jean: I do not!
Barbara: Double cheeseburger with bacon. Extra fear.
Jean: Mom! You are such a liar.
Violet: If I ever called my mother a liar she’d have knocked the goddamn head off my shoulders.

But it wasn’t Greedy politics which got that generation clear of the cold sea. It was the Greed that is Survival.

I will further deny
good got us up that broad shoreline

Beverly knew just what his generation was Great for.

Violet: You girls know there’s a will. […] Beverly mentioned some investments, if you can believe it, and we had things covered for you girls but he and I talked it over, after some years passed, and decided to change things. Leave everything to me. We never got around to taking care of it legally, but you should know, he meant to leave everything to me. Leave the money to me.

Greed may
like a fuse, but with the high shore we is stuck,
whom they overlook

the next generation, the narcissists. But they don’t talk about the greed of their Elders, knowing they have inherited their lust and invested it intelligently:

Karen Weston: It’s me. It’s juuust me—here and now. I got music on the stereo, a glass of wine and Blooper, my cat—I don’t need anything else. I can live my life with myself. Anyway, I got my licence and I threw myself into my work—sold a lot of houses—and that’s when I met Steve.

And the thirteen changeless stones in their six rooms / with a shelving of familiar mess / shared amongst me.

Barbara: Or you might never get round to having the auction and we could just have it for free when you die.

Restore the ruin-proud national mind, clutching at the gold cloth. What gift from the Greatest Generation?

Shh! on a twine hung from disastered trees
Beverley swings his daughters. They seem drunk.
…
he pushes violent, his calves distend

And then to have abandoned
own your young & old, the oldest, people
to a solitudinem of mournful communes,
mournful communes. [32]

Violet: […] Women aren’t sexy when they’re old. I can live with that. Can you live with that?
Mattie Fae: I can live with it, but I disagree. What about Sophia Loren? What about Lena Horne? She stayed sexy until she was eighty.
Violet: The world is round, get over it.

These truths were taken, then, here, in this production, as bald.  But don’t take such truth tellin’ so easily, take it—

Barbara: I’m fucken furious. His silence, his melancholy—he could have for me—for us— for all of us—he could have talked, included us, given us more. More time, more wisdom, more feeling.
Ivy: You might not have liked what you heard. What if the truth of the matter is Beverly Weston never liked you, never like any of us. Never had any special feeling of any kind for his children.

—as an elegy. The generations, like leaves    ..    the wind scatters one year’s   ..    but the forest burgeons  and the season of spring comes around   ..     so it is, one generation grows on    ..    another is passing on

—no more, this is the end. [25]

[1965 is the year Berryman won the Pulitzer for his 77 Dream Songs (published 1964) and, as future generations of American English Lit. majors will one day be able to tell you, is also the year Beverley Weston published his Meadowlark, which, too, apparently garnered serious critical praise. Most of what has come before is from Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs].