"August: Osage County"
Written by Tracy Letts; directed by Anna D. Shapiro; scenic design, Todd Rosenthal; costume design, Ana Kuzmanic; lighting design, Ann G. Wrightson; sound design, Richard Woodbury; original music, David Singer; fight choreographer, Chuck Coyl
Cast in order of appearance:
Beverly Weston, Jon DeVries; Johnna Montevata, DeLanna Studi; Violet Weston, Estelle Parsons; Ivy Weston, Angelica Torn; Mattie Fae Aiken, Libby George; Charlie Aiken, Paul Vincent O'Connor; Bill Fordham, Jeff Still; Barbara Fordham, Shannon Cochran; Jean Fordham, Emily Kinney; Sherriff Deon Gilbeau, Marcus Nelson; Karen Weston, Amy Warren; Steve Heidebrecht, Laurence Lau; Little Charles Aiken, Steve Key
Performances: National Tour closed Sunday, May 9, The Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston Street, Boston, Mass.
It seems somehow apt that the first national tour of Tracy Letts' Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway triumph August: Osage County came to an end on Mother's Day at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. The play, after all, is its own twisted hallmark to the mother-daughter relationship. Elevating family dysfunction to simultaneously hilarious and scathing dramatic art, August wades knee deep in the rubble of three shattered generations, exposing the pained humanity buried in its midst without ever resorting to sentimentality.
The remarkable Estelle Parsons reprises her Broadway turn as the pill-popping, venom-spewing family matriarch Violet Weston and creates for this crackerjack road company a complex and volatile center around which they can spin. Parsons gives her Violet an indefatigable core that rails against the ravages of cancer, chemotherapy, brain damage, and a violent past. She refuses to succumb to her own frailties or family pressures. She asks no forgiveness, she offers no apologies. Yet she manages to lace her brute of a mother with indisputable logic, wry humor, a shuffling gait, and slurred speech, making her at once contemptible and sadly vulnerable. She is also very funny.
The wheels of this wildly theatrical family drama are set in motion when Violet's alcoholic and melancholy writer husband Beverly disappears without a word. This brings the extended family rallying to Violet's side, converging on her Oklahoma homestead with baggage - both literal and figurative - in hand. Eldest daughter Barbara, who escaped to Colorado choosing marriage and family over career, has a wandering husband and a rebellious, pot-smoking daughter. Youngest daughter Karen, who's gone from one bad relationship to the next, now lives in Florida in a "life-is-beautiful" haze, turning a blind eye to the fact that her "wonderful" fiancé Steve may be involved in more than one illicit activity. Ivy, the middle daughter, is the one who never got away. Living just a few doors down the road from her parents, she is the "good daughter" whose mousy appearance and failed marriage draw constant criticism from both her mother and her outspoken aunt, Mattie Fae.
