August: Osage County

When a line like "Eat it, fucker, eat that catfish," delivered by a frustrated daughter (played brilliantly by Amy Morton) to her drug addict mother (Estelle Parsons), can contain such sadness and resignation (encapsulating the bleak outlook of playwright Tracy Letts) but also turn a tense, desperate exchange into a hilarious takedown of a failed familial relationship, the tone has been set for a dichotomous theater experience.  While none of the characters in August: Osage County are particularly likeable, they are unabashedly human, ultimately self-conscious of their flaws and excessively compromising choices but willing to try, anyway, to be better (mostly).  A crazy, pill-popping mother threatens to stand in the way of her three daughters' happiness, but we find out rather quickly that the women themselves are their biggest challenge in that regard, as each daughter stubbornly clings to her failures as though to remind her of where she comes from, "the plains," a place where sacrifices have to be made and resignation, choosing to want less from life, is a tradition almost as old as the environment which seems to produce it.  When Ivy, one of the daughters who happens to be in love with her first cousin (who turns out to be something else entirely), accuses her mother and sister of revealing a particular secret with the goal of ruining her last chance at happiness, she says, "You can't change my story," which at first sounds like "You can't make me change my mind" but ends up feeling oddly prophetic and interminably sad, as though this is where she was always meant -- for better or worse -- to end up. 

This sense of inevitability, of fated unhappiness, is what lends the play its severity, even as it sometimes feels like an absurdist black comedy.  I mean, it is an absurdist black comedy, and also a depressing drama about "the midwestern family," and also a uniquely American look at our fractured relationships with where we come from.  The Westons have a Native American maid, solidly moralistic and wholesome, who stands as an ephemeral counterpoint to their general wackiness, positioned to show us how noble the plains population was before all these fucked up Europeans took over, but while this (reductive, overly simple, and quite obvious) symbol of purity registers with the audience as vaguely correct, it does little to account for the nuances of this particular family and their uniquely fucked up circumstances.  The Westons are not Everyfamily, their problems so exaggerated as to almost parody the darkness that they are trying to reveal, so the end result is somewhat inconclusive. 

But none of this detracts from the entertainment of the presentation itself.  The world of the play, just as in Letts's previous Bug (adapted into a very affecting film by William Friedkin starring Ashley Judd as a woman whose meager environs begin to physically transform to represent the chaos of her inner life), constricts and folds in upon itself even as the characters methodically flee the stage, abandoning its central figures to examine their surroundings as they examine themselves: bracingly, unwillingly, terrified to look too closely.  What emerges is a beautiful mess of emotion with an ultimately muddled source.  "This situation is fraught," says one of the characters early on in the play, and this is certainly true of the general situation of August: Osage County.  Everyone is upset, and everyone blames someone else, and no one really knows what to do about any of it.