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| August: Osage County | 
 enlarge | Author: Tracy Letts
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 2321
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 152
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.4
ISBN: 1559363304
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.6
EAN: 9781559363303
ASIN: 1559363304
Publication Date: February 1, 2008
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Product Description
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people."-Time Out New York "Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original."-New York magazine One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest-and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007. Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Summer and Smoke (and Pills) February 11, 2008
22 out of 26 found this review helpful
When The Stern Librarian saw this show in New York recently she heard lot of debate at intermission (both of them!) about whether Tracy Letts has a written a classic to stand with the best of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, or whether the play is a Carol Burnett spoof of those masters. Anyone who thinks this play is nothing but a bawdy of exchange of insults and swears (and catfights about catfish) should read the published play. On the page it is abundantly clear that the poetry quoted in the lovely opening scene by the doomed husband finds its messy, human correlative in the scenes that follow, with language so memorable it deserves to be printed on t-shirts and sold in the lobby. This is a masterpiece from beginning to end, from August to tragic December. The Stern Librarian (I get a lot of reading done in the TKTS booth).
 Osage Can You See February 16, 2008
19 out of 35 found this review helpful
The Westons whale away at each other with unrelenting bitchery for three hours and five minutes. During the evening, various dysfunctions are revealed: alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, pedophilia, even incest. (Surprisingly, no one turns out to be gay, perhaps because the author didn't want to lump homosexuality in with incest, pedophilia, etc.). These revelations are hardly surprising, since the Westons are as screwed-up on the surface as they are underneath.
The play's wished-for ancestors are Long Day's Journey into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it kept reminding me of humbler fare: Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978), another semi-farcical expose of a family's infinite vices, and The Anniversary (1968), a Bette Davis film in which cackling Bette puts her grown children through a bumpy night. Like both of these vehicles, AOC has an insistently camp tone, and while this serves to keep the sniping tolerable, it also prevents it from going very deep. The dialogue is HBO-sitcom, though none of the laugh lines are actually funny, and the play is studded with would-be aphorisms that are neither funny, clever nor true. In one respect, at least, the author has internalized Albee's vision: all of his men are weak, and most of his women are harpies or cartoons.
The play also works a distinct vein of pretentiousness. An American Indian, symbolic of Those From Whom the Westons Stole the Land, presides over the family's dissolution from an attic perch. Literary name-dropping and quotation--T.S. Eliot, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson--are deployed to make the evening seem important. There is even a risible speech likening the Westons' disharmony to the supposed Decline and Fall of America. (Albee tried something similar in Virginia Woolf, suggesting that George and Martha's squabbling was a phenomenon of Spenglerian proportions).
But while AOC is neither a significant nor a good play, it is not boring either. The camp savagery keeps things humming, and occasionally throws off some genuine sparks--as in the play's best scene, a second-act dinner where the Weston's embittered and cancerous matriarch goads her offspring into physical violence. I often walk out on plays, and AOC's double intermissions gave me two opportunities to do so, but I didn't avail myself of either. And there you have the best thing I can say about this celebrated American drama: it didn't drive me out of the theatre.
"Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed." June 27, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
A dilapidated, one hundred year-old farmhouse on the plains outside Tulsa has been the home of the Weston family for generations, and Beverly Weston, the family patriarch, has long found refuge in alcohol. His termagant wife Violet takes pills, whatever pills she can lay hands on, and the two have little in common and have not really communicated for years. Bev, who once published a collection of poetry, now spends time quoting T. S. Eliot, and Eliot's line that "Life is very long..." serves as a motto for Bev in his life. Bev's Prologue sets the tone for the play, and when Act One begins, Bev has disappeared. The family has gathered to support each other while they await news on his whereabouts.
A dysfunctional family which represents just about every problem a family can have, the Westons who have gathered are the three daughters of Bev and Violet, along with Violet's sister Mattie Fay, her husband, and adult son. Barbara, at forty-six the eldest of the Westons' children, has arrived with her husband and precocious fourteen-year-old daughter. Ivy Weston, age forty-four, is unmarried, constantly resisting her mother's meddlesome probing and her cruel remarks about catching a man. Karen Weston, the youngest, at forty, has brought her fifty-year-old fiance with her. In the course of the three hours or more of this play, the family, overwhelmed by the selfish mean-spiritedness Violet, reveals and/or deals with their self-destructive behavior on all levels--from addictions, unhappy marriages, and infidelity, to sadism, suicide, pedophilia, and even incest.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2008, Tracy Letts deals with modern sensibilities but writes in the old-fashioned tradition of Long Day's Journey Into Night, Death of a Salesman (Broadway Theatre Archive), and even Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Big, broad, and complex in its development of the family dynamics, the play maintains a surprising level of black humor, despite the level of misery within this family.
As the action reaches its climax, and the various characters must decide how they will deal with the rest of their lives, the audience sees that the decisions that are made are the only ones that can be made, given the nature of these particular people and their limitations. It would be a mistake to say that the problems are "resolved," but they are, at least, "settled" for the audience. An intense and powerful drama with enough humor to keep the action from overwhelming the audience, August: Osage County is a memorable modern day addition to the tradition of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. n Mary Whipple
Man from Nebraska: A Play
Bug
Killer Joe, a Play
Biography - Letts, Tracy (1965-): An article from: Contemporary Authors Online
 Pretentious Soap Opera February 12, 2008
11 out of 33 found this review helpful
This play does not live up to the hype. There is nothing new about the play and it appears critics and audience rave about it because it's familiar. With all the twists, turns and family secrets, Mr. Letts has written a soap opera which would fit right in on TV. His finger prints are found on every page. Things happen because the playwright wants them to happen. In a good play, things grow naturally out of the action I found the characters shallow and uninteresting. The Native American caretaker is little more than a obvious symbol. Hasn't the time of the poor person of color coming to the aid of white folks come and gone? Sorry, but quoting T.S. Elliot exposes a shallow play. Once the New York production closes, the play will be done in some regional theaters and a few non-professional theaters; then it will fade away. August: Osage County (what a pretentious title) is not a modern American classic. Better plays are: Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Death of a Salesmen. They are American classics. As for superior contemporary plays, read: Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, Fifth of July, any play by August Wilson, Anna in the Tropics, Two Sisters and a Piano, Angels in America, and Topdog/Underdog, to name just a few. These are the plays that will be read and staged long after AOC is long forgotten.
The Most Exciting Play This Year February 7, 2008
8 out of 11 found this review helpful
August: Osage County is literally the most exciting play of the year. I saw the play in early January, and instantly fell in love with it. Which is an odd thing to say considering the plays heavy subject matter. It deals with everything from drug abuse, molestation, suicide and other topics that just by letting you know what they are would be spoilers.
And while it may seem over loaded with serious subjects, it is a play about a family coming together after the loss of a family member and is filled with so much humor, it's hard to believe that it's a drama. Of course most of the laughter comes out of awkwardness of the situation.
This family has their share of problems and they all rise to the surface when shoved together for the funeral. There are dishes broken, marragies ruined and lots of yelling and cursing. If it sounds a little melodramatic, it is. BUT it's written in such a clear, precise way, it transends simple melodrama and becomes something else all together.
My only reservation is that the play is very long. It is three full acts. (Running time was over 3 and a half hours on Broadway) BUT it is so worth it. It is able to cover so much ground because it's thorough and no plot of subject is dropped.
This is going to be a play that will be around for a while. A true ensemble piece, what we've come to expect from Steppenwolf Theatre. It is a Modern American Classic.
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