The San Francisco Bay Area premier staging (the Broadway
production toured in 2009) of Tracy Letts’ TONY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning
August: Osage County celebrating the
opening of Marin Theatre Company’s 50th season does not disappoint.
The stunning Broadway run of this new American classic that was something to
behold, a transfer from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company, with scene-crushing
Deanna Dunagan as the venomous and hilarious mother flailing through a sumptuous
naturalistic set.
In the much more intimate house at MTC, Artistic Director
Jasson Minadakis’ sturdy take on this dramedy is worthy of the weight that this
tortured family endures across three acts when the patriarch Beverly Weston
(superbly set up by Will Marchetti) goes missing.
The family gathers to assess the crisis at a large country
house outside of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, where the past haunts the present and
future. With obvious echoes of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Eugene O’Neill,
Letts’ play unfolds in unexpected ways. The wife, Violet, played with comic-tragic
verve by Sherman Fracher, is a cancer-stricken, pill-popping mess to Beverly’s
alcoholic poetic musings. She only sobers up in Act Two after the elder
daughter swoops in to attempt a takeover from her outpost in Colorado along
with the family clan from near and far.
In-laws, cousins, grandchildren and the three sisters (and
the men in their lives) all join in to reveal, expose and exorcise old wounds
and love in a full-throttle attack and celebration of the American Dream.
Debates on the beauty of aging women and daggers thrown at the “Greatest Generation”
are particularly comic and biting.
J.B. Wilson’s set is, at first, a maze of Modernist stairs
and platforms, but is revealed through Kurt Landisman’s discreet lighting to be
a frame to showcase what emotions hide in the shadows, how relationships evolve
in stages and how aspiration can be met with missteps and unpredictable twists
of fate.
The cast (all local favorites) bring out the script’s finer
points essential to this ensemble piece. Even supporting characters are
critical in this work, notably Charlie and Mattie Fae (Robert Sicular and Anne
Darragh), who fuel their scenes with keen intensity and realism. The elder
sister Barbara, features the nuanced Arwen Anderson as a full-fledged antidote
and mirror of her mother.
For those who only saw the Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts
film version, this a true reminder of how the stage version of this story
outshines the gloss of film with an emotional impact only possible under the
wings of the right actors and the pro team behind this production. Indeed, “Here
we go round the prickly pear,” as T.S. Eliot is referenced in this world of the
Westons, “This is the way the world ends.”
Marin Theatre Company, Mill Valley. Through October 2,
Tuesday-Sunday, 7:00 pm, Sat-Sun matinees at 1:00 pm. $22-60. 415-388-5208.
marintheatre.org.
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