Cautionary Tale of Family Rancor

Vitriolic wit permeates this dark comedy in a depressingly accurate portrayal of the modern American family. Flashes of poetry lash out through mumbling exchanges and misunderstood conversations typical of disillusioned relationships. Family members talk and shout at each other, unwilling to listen before replying, deliberately twisting words, and desperately unhappy. Lighting designer Kurt Landisman expertly weaves a story through careful illumination—harsh daylight for the main action, soft for supporting vignettes, and semi-darkness silhouetting poignant tableaux of the grieving family huddled in pain, watching TV, or quietly reading. Beverly, the patriarch, goes missing and is eventually found drowned after committing suicide. His wife turns to her addiction for solace, ruling with cruel wordplay until her daughter snaps under the poisonous atmosphere, ripping apart the already broken gathering. August: Osage County heightens the drama many families suffer from, spotlighting how casual quips can turn into hurtful exchanges and true pain when we inflict them on those we love. In the lobby, discussions came up of re-evaluating what to say during holidays; perhaps comments like “Elbows off the table! Were you born in a barn?” are not appropriate or constructive, but serve simply to wound.

August: Osage County ramps up in the second act into spine-tingling drama due to the tempestuous relationship of Barbara (Arwen Anderson) with her mother, Violet (Sherman Fracher). Anderson’s performance in the confrontation is sensational. She moves from irritated sniping to seething at the emotional jabs, and righteous fury, thundering out “I’m running things now!” leaving the audience catching their breath. Fracher’s physicality makes the role; she stumbles up and down the teetering set, kneeling, swaggering, and falling with reckless abandon. Her breakdown of grief for Beverly (Will Marchetti) takes powerful form as she crawls upstairs, clutching at the wood, crying out for her lost husband. Danielle Bowen (Jean) is the odd one out as the youngest—present, but not seen as a contributor. Her casual, wannabe bad girl front hides a dangerously innocent teenage girl.

Running through the play is a theme of living in the present, and embracing what that means, good or bad. It is shown in Ivy’s (Danielle Levin) romantic notions, Bill’s (David Ari) pursuit of a younger woman, and Violet’s jaded vision of female body image. The supporting cast is riveting, from Robert Sicular’s awkward speech of grace before dinner as Charlie to Kathleen Pizzo’s (Johnna) comforting and occasionally daring interactions. Realistic Native American characters are rare, and she is a grounding presence in the mayhem onstage.

Ashley Holvick’s costume designs underline the authentic feel of the family. Clothing is soiled, well used, and sloppy or starkly understated in an intimate reflection of each character. Barbara’s journey descends from elegant lines of a perfect suburban housewife to underwear and old pajamas. J.B. Wilson’s sets of naked beams crisscross in a chaotic jumble, allowing for intimate family moments while maintaining the isolation of characters such as Johnna in the attic, or Violet in a Spartan bedroom. Dialog becomes the set dressing of the unadorned dwelling, painting a visual picture in the mind, rather than handing over the interior on a silver platter. A strength of theatre over cinema is that imagination still plays a vital role in the story’s creation, rather than relying on polished special effects. The bare house is filled with emotion, rather than objects, colored by our own family history. Marin Theatre Company has brilliantly set up an in depth display thanks to the work of dramaturg Lydia Garcia, including a board for post it notes from audience members talking about what family means to them. Take a moment to peruse them—sentiments vary wildly from statements that family is “the best most important part of my life” to merely “awkward holiday dinners”. Detailed analysis continues into the bathrooms, which feature hanging plaques about life on the plains in Oklahoma.

August: Osage County is a bleak examination of human nature, and our propensity to attack those we love instead of building them up. Marin Theatre Company presents a clever, gloomy depiction of family that serves as a reminder not to take our relationships for granted, but to nurture them. August: Osage County features a stellar cast in a Pulitzer Prize winning play that is not for the faint of heart, delving into the loathsome depths of frustrated dreams.

‘August: Osage County’ sweats with spiteful situations

Marin Theatre Company opens its 50th Anniversary Season with a riveting story chronicling a family who gathers together for support, but attacks with accusations and strife. 

Playwright Tracy Letts has written a sharply drawn observation of self-destructive characters whose actions set them on a collision course. The play won both a TONY and a Pulitzer Prize for its ferocious portrayals.

Director Jasson Minadakis brings out such intense and believable characters from the actors, it feels as though we are passengers on their inevitable train wreck.

The title refers to an Osage County homestead outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the hot days of August. Violet, the matriarch of the family, demands her daughters help her cope with the disappearance of her alcoholic husband Beverly, a cameo role by veteran Will Marchetti.

Drug-woozy Violet distrusts everyone and does little to cope with anything. Petite Sherman Fracher is almost too convincing in this role as a caustic, nasty druggie. Violet’s cruel remarks are matched only by her sister Mattie Fae (Anne Darragh) who relentlessly demeans both her husband Charlie (Robert Sicular) and son (Patrick Kelly Jones). Where did these women learn such spiteful skills?

Violet’s grown daughters reluctantly join their mother, each with her own hidden agenda and a target pinned to her back. They are helpless in the face of Violet’s devastating destruction.

Ivy (Danielle Levin) has cared for her callous mother for years. It’s no wonder she wants off the firing line and into a new and secret life.

Barbara (Arwen Anderson) is the take-charge successful type, so she drags her estranged husband (David Ari) and rebellious daughter (Danielle Bowen) into the mix to uphold appearances. It doesn’t work.

Third sister Karen (Joanne Lubeck) whirls in from her fantasy world (Florida, no less) with a self-absorbed personality and a randy beau (Peter Ruocco). Considering his indiscretions, it’s good this sister is so self-absorbed. At least she has plausible deniability.

The role played by Kathleen Pizzo as the Cheyenne gal hired to help the household is quiet and soothing. It’s the only calm spot in this wickedly fierce drama. Another small anchor in this maelstrom is Ryan Tasker as the handsome and now-divorced Sheriff.

“August: Osage County” delivers much more than astounding acting in bitter situations. This remarkable drama is peppered with laugh-out-loud moments in a dramatically sparse set by J. B. Wilson. Although three hours in length, the actors’ spillover into the audience keeps the energy high. There was not a nodding head in the house.

Marin Theatre Company’s ‘August: Osage County’ a huge achievement

You might not think that a three-hour play about family dysfunction would be so engaging that a good portion of the audience would probably be quite happy to keep it going for another hour or two. Yet, that was the feeling I had on opening night of Marin Theatre Company’s brilliant production of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County.
Recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and that year’s Tony Award for Best Play, it is an artfully designed, amoral synthesis of tragedy and situational comedy. There are no heroes to celebrate in Letts’ world, nor victims to arouse our sympathies. No obvious comic situations, either. Instead, while the parade of misery on stage may be disturbing at first, it can easily transform into a hunger for just one more awful revelation.

Shadenfreude? Probably. But to enjoy watching Letts’ characters flop around like fish in a net, struggling to extricate themselves from dilemmas that are almost entirely of their own making is nothing to feel guilty about. Since most families have problems of one kind or another, it’s comforting to learn that the author’s own personal history (August is semi-autobiographical) and its dramatized echos are filled with more turmoil than most of us have ever imagined.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Letts is a master storyteller who knows how to take the darker elements of present-day American popular culture—fraught daytime soaps, heavy-breathing Telemundo romances, voyeuristic films that fill moviehouses, real-life scandals, sex and violence that infect everyday society—and integrate them into a rewarding evening at the theater. That takes extraordinary skill.

Crisply directed by Jasson Minadakis, MTC’s excellent cast makes the most of this rich dramatic  material. The first scene is the key to everything that follows. Will Marchetti, one of Marin’s favorite actors, portrays Beverly Weston, poet patriarch of the Weston clan, who leads off with a rambling, alcohol-infused discourse that includes references to fellow poets T.S. Eliot and John Berryman, interspersed with confessions about his addiction, fears of aging and approaching mortality. He describes years of battles with his force-of-nature-prescription-drug-addict wife Violet (Sherman Fracher) and how the two of them have reached a detente—“She takes pills and I drink.” Finally, perhaps aware that help of another kind may soon be needed, he hires Johnna (Kathleen Pizzo), a soulful young Native American girl, to be the family cook and housekeeper.

With these elements in place, Letts takes us off to the races. It’s five days later and Beverly has disappeared. Fearing the worst, the Weston clan gathers from near and far. These include Violet’s caustic sister, Mattie Fae (Anne Darragh), her long-suffering husband Charlie (Robert Sicular) and their repressed son “Little” Charles (Patrick Kelly Jones); Violet and Beverly’s three daughters, tough-minded Barbara (Arwen Anderson), her estranged husband Bill (David Ari) and their lonely teenage daughter Jean (Danielle Bowen); Karen (Joanne Lubeck) and her philandering fiance Steve (Peter Ruocco); and timid Ivy (Danielle Levin), whose dream is to run off to New York and start a new life with Little Charles.

Their worst fears are confirmed when Sheriff Deon Gilbeau (Ryan Tasker) brings news that Beverly’s boat and body have been found in a nearby lake. That initiates about an hour of furious back-biting, accusations, counter-accusations and recriminations, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen on an American stage. But, as I said before, once you get into the swing of things, it’s fun to watch. My only caveat about the production is that J.B. Wilson’s skeletal three-story scenic design, with its A-frame roofline and raked dining table in the center, creates an awkward playing space for actors.

August: Osage County may not be great literature, but it’s a huge achievement for Letts—and for Marin Theatre Company, as well.

‘August: Osage County’ Worth Revisiting, Canonizing

J.B. Wilson’s set for Marin Theatre Company’s “August: Osage County,” which opened Tuesday, Sept. 15, looks like it could spring offstage and whack audience members upside the head.

That weapon is just a table, around which three generations of a family eat together, for the first time in years, in the wake of a ghastly shock. But that table, placed at the center of a wooden skeleton of a three-story house, is enormous, angled steeply from a second story down to the stage. (In the show’s big meal scene, actors sit on the steps of two staircases, one on either side of it.) The set piece’s boards widen as they get closer to the audience, creating the illusion that the table is even longer than it actually is, stretching toward a vanishing point skyward, like a bludgeon held in the hand of god.

It doesn’t actually strike the audience, of course, but that table nonetheless fulfills the promise of its expressionistic design, meting out dolorous punishment on the cursed Weston family, and on one member in particular, who later says she “was spoiling for a fight.”

The curse on this rural Oklahoma clan isn’t as explicit as it is in, say, Greek tragedy. The play alludes only vaguely to ancestors’ genocide of Native Americans, and no god or prophet directly tells the audience that the sins of the parents — addiction, squandered talent, meager love, unfair expectations and an incisive breed of cruelty that homes in on unhealed wounds — must be visited upon the children. But Tracy Letts’ drama carries so much moral heft, paints so full a portrait of the pain that only family members can induce, that its doom feels religiously ordained.

“August: Osage County” caused great fanfare when it premiered in 2007, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play the following year. Revisiting it today, Jasson Minadakis, who directs a 13-member cast, makes the case that the play wasn’t just a success of its moment but rather an enduring and unique contribution to the tradition of the American family play. If “The Glass Menagerie” is a story of the prodigal son leaving home, and in “Buried Child” the prodigal son comes back to a home that’s forgotten him, then “August: Osage County” writes the next chapter. We now live in a world where children, having long departed the family homestead, only visit. Ours is a society, the play attests, that will one day be defined by our failure to care for, to simply be with, our elders as they sicken and near the end of life — not that those elders make it easy, or even possible, to do so. A defining image in this production is its final one: Violet (Sherman Fracher), the matriarch, having driven out all her relatives by blood and marriage, can seek solace only by weeping in the lap of Johnna (Kathleen Pizzo), the Native American help her husband, Beverly (Will Marchetti), hired.

Minadakis’ cast is excellent in achieving that rare quality that is the backbone of every great drama: In each conflict, both diametrically opposed sides feel urgently, absolutely in the right. A special commendation goes to Arwen Anderson as Barbara, Violet’s imperious daughter whose declaration at the close of act two, “I’m running things now!” feels both righteous and foreboding of still further hell. A veteran of Bay Area stages, Anderson often plays roles in which she radiates goodness and openness, so to see her rankle, bloviate and flail with equal command is a true treat, but just one in a production that’s full of them — assuming you can stand how close to home it might hit.

‘August: Osage County,’ Marin Theatre Company’s Cruel Summer

The house is falling apart, and it’s been falling apart for a very long time. That’s the impression one gets when one looks at J.B. Wilson’s remarkable multistory set for “August: Osage County,” the play that kicks off Marin Theatre Company’s 50th season. It looks like the rotting wooden skeleton of a house, with many broken planks. In the center is a long table steeply tilted toward the audience that nicely symbolizes the unease of an excruciatingly uncomfortable dinner scene that makes up the second of three acts.

The family whose house it is has been falling apart for a long time, too. The matriarch, Violet Weston (Sherman Fracher, grimly amusing in her alarming instability), pops pills to the point of staggering incoherence, and when she does have enough presence of mind to put words together, they’re downright vicious. Her husband, Beverly (longtime Marin actor and former MTC artistic director Will Marchetti, wry and grounded) is more philosophical and quietly tolerant, but also emotionally checked out, deliberately losing himself in drink. And when Beverly disappears one day, the rest of the family arrives to show just how messed up the Westons really are.

“August: Osage County” is a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts, whose play “Killer Joe” was a turning point for Marin Theatre Company in 2006. “August” premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007 and went to Broadway the same year. It first hit the Bay Area in a post-Broadway tour in 2009.

It’s a darkly funny and emotionally grueling drama that lasts three and a half hours with two intermissions, but it doesn’t seem long at all in artistic director Jasson Minadakis’ compellingly tense staging with a terrific cast of Bay Area actors, about half of them from Marin. The mood is highly accentuated by the gloomy lighting of Kurt Landisman, designing his 50th show for MTC.

Danielle Levin is a sympathetically long-suffering Ivy, the relatively quiet one of the three daughters and the only one who stayed home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, enduring her mother’s constant criticism and steady decline. Arwen Anderson forcefully tries to hold everything together as eldest daughter Barbara, who’s trying to keep it quiet that her marriage to fellow college professor Bill (a mild-mannered and conflict-averse David Ari of Sausalito) is falling apart. Their sullen daughter Jean (a prickly Danielle Bowen, a Mill Valley native) just wants to smoke pot and avoid the family drama altogether.

Youngest sister Karen (an inanely chatty Joanne Lubeck of San Anselmo) makes a big deal about how she’s always fallen way too hard for horrible men, but it’s different now because she’s she’s head over heels for a really great guy. Of course, it’s immediately apparent that her new fiance, Steve (a skin-crawlingly oily Peter Ruocco of Sausalito), isn’t exactly breaking her streak of rotten beaus.

Violet’s sister Mattie Fae (a garrulous Anne Darragh of Lagunitas) is always putting her son down, the introverted Little Charles (Marin native Patrick Kelly Jones, anxious and withdrawn), much to the annoyance of her good-hearted husband, Charlie (affable Robert Sicular), who’s doing his best to sidestep the Weston family minefield of cruelty.

Relatively untouched by all this drama is the unflappable young Cheyenne housekeeper Johnna (a pleasant and deadpan Kathleen Pizzo). Ryan Tasker makes a gentle visitor as the local sheriff, an old classmate of Barbara’s.

The play can be difficult to watch sometimes, either because you know something devastating is about to happen or because you can’t guess what’s next but know it can’t be good. But for the same reason, it’s impossible to look away. It’s a fascinatingly bleak and ruefully comical exploration of what the bonds of kinship really mean and whether they can be stronger than the aggressively dysfunctional relationships that are tearing the family apart.