muddy boots
by Douglas Messerli
Tracy Letts August: Osage County, Imperial Theatre, December 4, 2007 / the
performance I attended was on January 22, 2008
How could I not attend such a play on my January visit to the city?
While I left the Imperial however, recognizing the ambitions of this play, and
I was, in fact, reeling—given the
three-hour length of this drama—otherwise I was quite unable to explain the
superlatives of New York critics, a position I share with the more
introspective review by Peter Marks of the Washington
Post.
This play most certainly called up several of the grand masters and
works of American theater: although representing a much larger family, August echoes with the pained outcries
of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey
into Night and reverberates with family squabbles of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But in the end,
the play seems to have more in common with that dramatic potboiler of family
greed and vengeance, Lillian Hellman’s The
Little Foxes. Yet even Hellman’s heavy-handed portrayal of the monstrous
American family, The Hubbards, can’t quite compare with the evil shenanigans of
Tracy Lett’s Oklahoma-based Weston clan.
Already in the very first scene, as sometime poet and academic, now full-time
drunk Beverly Weston hires a Native American (a term that seems to outrage
other Weston family members) as cook-nurse-nanny to him and his wife, we are
told of the couple’s eccentricities: if Beverly is an alcoholic, his wife
Violet’s choice of self-destruction is through pills, the two living together
in a shuttered-up house, recognizing neither night nor day in their wretched
lives. Nearby, lives their middle-aged daughter, Ivy, a woman clearly desperate
to escape her family ties.
When Beverly soon after goes missing, the remaining two daughters,
Barbara and Karen descend, along with their husband, boyfriend, daughter,
uncle, aunt, and cousin upon the old homestead, each bringing with them serious
emotional baggage.
Mattie Fae Aiken, Violet Weston’s sister, verbally abuses Little
Charles, while her husband, Charlie lovingly forgives his son’s inability to
find a job or even arrive on time for his Uncle’s funeral. Oh, I forgot to tell
you, as the family has gathered round the overheated hearthside of the old
family estate, Beverly’s body has been found, apparently having drowned himself
in a nearby lake!
Despite her daily—sometimes hourly—cocktails of any drug she can find,
Violet remains quite violently in charge of this improbable gathering of clan.
Like Medusa, she confronts them, demanding awful attention, seeming to know all
their dark secrets even before they do. When Mattie Fae discovers that Ivy is
planning to marry her son, who is actually Ivy’s half-brother, the product of
her long-ago affair with Beverly, she confides in Barbara. But later, as
Barbara attempts to gently reveal the truth to her sister, Violet blurts it
out, having known of her husband’s infidelity for all these years. Her spiteful
revelation sends Ivy out of the house with even more determination to marry her
brother-cousin!
As everything comes to a rancid boil, most of the family escape, leaving
Barbara to cope with her mother—until she too is faced with yet one more family
secret: Violet knew of her husband’s intention to commit suicide, and instead
of calling the motel to save him, waited until she could open their
safe-deposit box the next day, reconfirming his belief that she no longer had
any lingering love nor desire to save him or herself.
When finally even Barbara runs off into the night, Violet is left only
with the hugs of the inexplicably unflappable and competent housekeeper
Johanna, who sings her an Indian lullaby.
If my quickened recounting of family affairs sounds a bit
incomprehensible, I readily admit it. But this is, after all, a soap opera
plot. Unlike the witty family drama I saw two days earlier, The Homecoming, whose effects relied
almost entirely upon language, August:
Osage County, despite some moments of witty verbal sparring, relies almost
entirely upon this ludicrous plot. While the wonderfully talented acting
ensemble from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater hide the fact, the truth remains
that few, if any, of these figures are complex enough to explain their
over-the-top behaviors.
Why is Barbara’s husband, for example, so determined to return to his
student sweet-heart, daughter-in-tow, when it is apparent to all that the
affair will be only a temporary event? Although we are told that his wife is
transforming before his eyes into a hard-hearted woman like her mother, there
is little evidence of that fact in the play itself; Barbara seems to me as the
only sane, if slightly overwrought, character in the whole bunch. If nothing
else, she is the only family member willing to take on any responsibility. It
is she, after all, who knows what do about her mother’s addiction, how to
confiscate and destroy all those hundreds of hidden pills, hidden previously
even within the folds of her own vagina. Only Barbara seems to discern that her
sister Karen is equally doomed in her would-be relationship with the
philandering Steve, that her other sister Ivy should be stopped from marrying
her near-idiot brother-cousin. Why is Ivy so determined, after remaining all of
these years at home, to suddenly run off? Clearly she is tortured by her
mother, but it is also quite obvious she will be unable to find any employment,
nor her companion-to-be, who apparently has lived most of his life without a
decent job.
For that matter, how did the father and mother of this maniacal brood
become such impossible ogres? Can Beverly’s lack of real poetic and
intellectual talent truly explain his dipsomaniacal-suicidal condition? And how
might anyone become the harridan that Violet represents? Her story of her
unfulfilled desire for a Christmas gift of a pair of cowboy boots in order
impress a teenage boy for who she had developed a schoolgirl crush, hardly
explains her total selfishness, her greed, her near-murderous acts.
Her story—as she pulls open the Christmas box wherein she imagines the
lovely boots to be waiting, she discovers instead a pair of muddy, shit-covered
galoshes, awarded to her by her mother out of spite—gives evidence rather to
something with which the author himself has not completely come to terms: that
all those Western myths, the cowboy lore of courage, honesty, determination,
hard work, and belief, you know, the kind of frontier ethic posited by hundreds
of American tales, films, and even musicals [see my essay on the musical Oklahoma! in My Year 2002] seldom, perhaps never
existed. It was always men and women stomping through the mud and shit of their
lives that made us what we are today, an often mean and stupid folk, a people
who would still prefer an operatic-like overstatement of our existence, like
Letts’ play—a reality born, metaphorically speaking, from a “cancer of the
mouth” (Violet’s illness)—than a truly complex revelation of our mutual
experiences.
Los Angeles, February 9, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).
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