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The laugh
lines come fast and furious. The women sit
at the dining table—or in the
bedroom—confessing and confiding, gossiping
about their relatives, giddy and then
outraged. No, it’s not Golden Girls Live,
but rather it’s Tracy Letts’ August: Osage
County—and the man knows how to write a
zinger, or mare accurately, zinger after
zinger after zinger. And with the
Steppenwolf Theatre Company acting the roles
as if they’ve owned them for life (which,
actually, up to this point, they have), it’s
hard not to sit back and let the good times
roll. Of course, it’s not all good times in
Osage County, given the patriarch’s
disappearance, leaving behind a
drug-addicted wife and three grown daughters
who return to the roost to determine what
happened to poor dad—poor dad, hanging in
the closet— But wait, that’s another show—
This one also has overtones of Lillian
Hellman’s Little Foxes, particularly as
evinced in the matriarch’s mendacity and
cut-throat behavior (a consequence of her
addictions, of course…). And there are also
parallels to Jerry Springer—both the musical
and the t.v. show. There’s barely a
“disorder” that isn’t tossed into the mix of
familial dysfunctionality—and by the time
the issue of incest is revealed—shades of
Chinatown (“She’s my sister, he’s my
brother”), you might be inclined to call out
your own favorite dysfunction–and see what
this remarkably adept cast can do with it.
There’s little doubt you’ll have fun with
this show (for is there anyone in this
tell-all society who doesn’t love dirty
laundry aired?) but at show’s end, you might
be left wondering why you’d spent the
evening with such a sorry lot of losers.
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