THE Waltons, they’re not. The Weston clan, which last night took the first of what should be many bows in Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” is the kind of family who put the diss into dysfunctional, and took the music out of “Oklahoma!”
The play is set in Pawhuska, Okla., 60 miles northwest of Tulsa, and quite a few miles more beneath common decent behavior.
Yet the Westons are certainly a fascinating bunch and, at times, if only because of their brutal honesty, oddly likable.
Any family that shouts, rants, throws plates, smokes dope and drops into unwitting incest can’t be all bad. Certainly not from a dramatic point of view – and the Westons are never less than dramatic.
“August: Osage County” – which originated, like so much of the best in the American theater, from Chicago’s Steppenwolf troupe – is in the grand tradition of American family shenanigans, such as Lillian Hellman’s melodrama “The Little Foxes.”
Some even compare it to Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” but this I think would be in length rather than depth (“August” runs three hours and 20 minutes, with two intermissions).
Others will view this as O’Neill with a built-in laugh track and more naughty words than David Mamet could shake a stick at.
Still, American epic or not, it’s enormously entertaining.
Set in a rambling, old three-story house (Todd Rosenthal’s super-realistic set, with carefully calibrated period costumes by Ana Kuzmanic), the saga opens with the family patriarch, Beverly Weston (beautifully played by the playwright’s father, Dennis Letts), a sometime poet and university lecturer turned full-time drunk, hiring a Native American housekeeper, Johnna (Kimberly Monevata).
Sipping bourbon and quoting T.S. Eliot and, more significantly, John Berryman, he explains his relationship with his wife: “My wife takes pills, and I drink . . . that’s the bargain we’ve struck.”
By the next scene, Beverly has disappeared. The entire Weston clan – three less-than-Chekhovian sisters plus their various attachments – gather to assist their mother in the family crisis and, of course, to fight.
Deadly insult is the very dialect of the Westons.
From the start, Beverly’s wife, the addled but caustic Violet (Deanna Dunagan) – suffering from cancer of the mouth (physically and metaphorically) and enjoying a surfeit of prescription drugs – suggests her husband does something unprintable to an (unprintable) sow’s hindquarters.
“All right,” he mildly replies.
She pretty much hates her own daughters – not to mention her sister (Rondi Reed), who turns up with her own husband and son.
The three sisters hate one another, but bile is thicker than water, so they all, in their quaint way, get along.
They have their troubles. One sister, Barbara (Amy Morton), is about to be divorced and has a 14-year-old daughter who’s a pothead, and maybe worse; Karen (Marian Mayberry) is engaged to a
thrice-divorced child molester; and Ivy (Sally Murphy) is in love with . . . well, I’ll leave you to discover with whom. But, believe me, it’s not good news.
No wonder Barbara observes: “Thank God we can’t tell the future. We’d never get out of bed.” But if they didn’t, we’d be deprived of a lot of good dirty fun.
The immaculate staging is by Anna D. Shapiro, and the ensemble acting by the whole cast (most of whom, like Shapiro and Letts, are members of the Steppenwolf Theater Company) is simply beautiful.
“August: Osage County” would be worth seeing for the acting and staging alone. Luckily, Letts’ cheerfully scabrous play doesn’t make that necessary.
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY
The Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St.; (212) 239-6200.