Review: August: Osage County

The first thing to say about the MTC's production of August: Osage County is that it is a brilliant example of this kind of well-made theatre. You know, as soon as you walk into the Playhouse and see Dale Ferguson's triple-level set, that you're in for a big soap opera of a play. It's a house in almost cubist cross-section, the upper bedrooms perilously exposed like those pictures of bombed London houses in the second world war. Every naturalistic detail is there: the papered-over windows, the family snapshots on the sideboard by the dining table, the bookshelves, the old record player. It screams "multi-generational family drama".

And you get precisely what is written on the box. Tracy Letts' play, written for the Chicago company Steppenwolf, is a sprawling family tragi-comedy (some wags over in the US have called it "situation tragedy") which attempts to diagnose the pathologies of contemporary mid-west America, and here it's given a bravura production by Simon Phillips. August: Osage County comes to Australia on a wave of press adulation: a Pulitzer Prize winner, it’s been hailed as the best play to hit Broadway for a decade.


The play dances on the exposed nerves of the Weston family, who are in the midst of spectacular meltdown. Beverly (George Whaley) and his wife Violet (Robyn Nevin) observe what Beverly calls the “cruel covenant” of marriage. As he tells the hired Native American help Johnna (Tess Masters), “The facts are: my wife takes pills, and I drink”. When Beverly suddenly vanishes, their relatives descend on the house, partners and children in tow, setting the stage for a fraught process of revelation and damage. Family secrets rattle out of the closet and lives are destroyed with a flick of the tongue.

It’s an ambitious play in a grand American tradition, but Letts has incorporated other contemporary influences – notably television – into the mix. The odd thing is that the televisual influences are pretty dusty. Over the past few years, some of the most exciting television in the world has been made in the States - bold, formally imaginative and uncompromising stuff like Deadwood or The Wire - but Letts' play reflects an earlier era of traditional soap opera and situation comedy. This makes it comfortably familiar, but gives the writing a sepia tinge.

And the rapturous claims that August: Osage County is the new Great American Play make me wonder what has happened to the Great American Play. Letts references practically all of them - the drug-addled shamble of Violet Weston echoes the morphine-heavy steps of Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night; the inter-generational savagery and destructiveness reflects Tennessee Williams, especially The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; the tragic inexorability of family secrets outing themselves into the next generation is like Miller's All My Sons. And so on. But when you put this play in the company of O'Neill et al, it shrinks to its proper size. It's a potboiler.

The play opens, via a rambling monologue from Beverly (a former poet and English professor) with some self-conscious literary referencing - John Berryman, a suicide, and TS Eliot. (Eliot's poem The Hollow Men is in fact the play's shaping metaphor). But this, like most of the first act, is basically naked exposition: the themes that are to follow are all carefully flagged, as if the text is designed to be written about by English students.

We are told that August: Osage County is about Bush’s America, the corrupted and shattered ideals of post-9/11 society. It's about "the greatest generation", struggling out of poverty into the middle classes, and their spoiled, confused and scarred children and grand children. It's about addiction and generational inheritance. It's about the mid-west. There's enough there for scads of comprehension essays, all laid out carefully like cutlery on a dinner table.

This is particularly clear in the weakest part: the Native American servant, Johnna, is the spiritual blessing and refuge of the house, just as Native American spirituality is the true authenticity of America, yada yada. This woman appears to have no character or motivation outside her heavy symbolism; she sits patiently in her attic room in a lotus position reading books and offering advice to various troubled family members, unless she is called upon to make dinner or lay the table or to hit a lecherous man on the head with a frying pan. Unlike everyone else, we never know why she is there (aside from needing a job) and why she puts up with this family. I guess it's her indigenous saintliness.

What happened, I wonder, to the poetic of subtext? Here it's all worn on the outside, perhaps out of fear that otherwise we'll miss it. Perhaps this accounts too for some of that clumsy plotting. And all the trauma this family undergoes is made palatable by the laughter: it's sometimes uncomfortable, true, as when you find yourself laughing at a drugged old woman gracelessly dancing to an old record. But the eviscerating emotional catharsis attained by the earlier dramatists doesn't exist here: it's soft focus tragedy that never actually pierces your heart with painful interior knowledge.

When you think of the explosive nuclear energy of Sam Shepard, whose play Buried Child was a celebrated Steppenwolf production in the 1990s, it's hard not to speculate that something has gone rotten in American drama. (Maybe it was always rotten, pace Peter Brook - Shepard never sat easily in the mainstream, after all...) While Shepard picked up the popular culture of his day - rock and roll, country and western, science fiction, Hollywood westerns, television, drugs - and used them to generate a new energy in the theatre, Letts is rather bringing these mass culture influences into play as pacifying devices, comforting recognitions that sweeten bitter truths.

The great strength of this play is, however, that it's written for actors. It's full of fabulous roles, and Phillips' cast, particularly the women, makes the most of their opportunities. It's dominated by a scorching performance by Robyn Nevin in the central role of Violet Weston, a drug-hazed wreck whose truth-telling has the compassion of an open razor. This is Nevin at her best, playing a complex, sardonic, damaged monster, unnervingly savage and vulnerable. Meeting her in savagery and depth is Jane Menelaus as Violet's daughter Barbara; these two play out the central conflict of the drama, as Barbara, reeling from a failed marriage, reverts to family patterns and finds that, of all the sisters, she is most like the mother she rejects.

Around them in an almost uniformly strong cast, performances notable for their passionate complexities include Deidre Rubenstein as Violet's blowsy sister Mattie Fae, Heidi Arena and Rebekah Stone as Barbara's two damaged sisters and Roger Oakley as Mattie Fae's put-upon husband. It's good to see Simon Phillips back in form: this is an intelligently orchestrated production. The flexible set permits swift scene changes, signalled by Matt Scott's lighting changes, so the play moves fluidly, with the minimum of distraction. It all, basically, works.

In short, it's a fine production of a play that doesn't live up to its hype. I can't help wishing it did: perhaps the reason that it's been so welcomed is that this scale of ambition and staging is relatively rare in contemporary theatre. It's still enjoyable, in that melodramatic soap opera way, and ought to be a popular hit for the MTC. And it's worth a visit for the performances alone. But in the end, it makes naturalistic drama look old fashioned. Maybe the clue to its future vitality really is in contemporary American television, but this play is looking in the wrong places.

Picture: Sean Taylor, Robert Menzies, Rebekah Stone, Robyn Nevin and Michael Robinson in August: Osage County.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, directed by Simon Phillips. Set and costumes by Dale ferguson, lighting design by Matt Scott, sound design by David Franzke. With George Whaley, Tess Masters, Robyn Nevin, Rebekah Stone, Deidre Rubenstein, Roger Oakley, Jane Menelaus, Robert Menzies, Kellie Jones, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Heidi Arena, Sean Taylor and Michael Robinson. Melbourne Theatre Company at the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre, until June 27.