Dramas Get Attention And Give Musicals A Run For Their Money
Filed Under Curt Hennig | Posted on April 1, 2008
For at least 25 years, the premier commercial theater district in the country has been dominated by musicals. Such serious dramatists as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were once represented on Broadway marquees, but the straight play was pushed to the margins during the final third of the last century.
As the audience base shifted from local theater-goers to business travelers and tourists, long-running musicals with recognizable brand names - “Cats,” “Les Miserables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” among them - joined the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building as icons of New York.
That has changed this theater season, which officially ends in two months. The best musical category in the Tony Awards in June will be upstaged by the competition for best play. Major English, Irish and American dramatists contributed new work to Broadway this season, with subsequent attention from critics and audiences.
A recent trip to New York provided the opportunity to check in with four of the most notable contenders for spring awards.
Poets and trailer parks
Move over Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and all other modern spinners of dysfunctional family tales. The mother of all domestic predator plays is currently on Broadway, and fittingly, a mother is the carnivore in chief.
“August: Osage County,” a comic drama that began its life in Chicago last summer, is simply jaw-dropping. The marathon of bad behavior vaults playwright Tracy Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, onto the top tier of contemporary American dramatists.
“Trashy soap opera” describes the surface gloss of this play. The Weston family of rural Oklahoma may have a patriarch who is a recognized poet and academic, but these folks don’t control their nasty impulses any better than the trailer park residents of Letts’ first stage piece, the off-Broadway hit “Killer Joe.” They are just smarter, funnier and speak with a more articulate crudity.
Father Beverly Weston’s disappearance sets the plot in motion. His three adult daughters and their mates gather at the home he shared with his pill-popping, screeching wife, their mother, Violet. Her brassy sister and mild-tempered brother-in-law are also on the scene, as is their browbeaten adult son.
It is clear that the Westons have been in the physically frail Violet’s malevolent grip for a long time. She picks emotional scabs and plunges verbal stilettos into her offspring with breathtaking gusto and skill.
Violet’s maternal mayhem has reaped a harvest of wounded daughters. They have chosen significantly flawed men, and together they would fill a therapist’s waiting room with an intriguing assortment of self-destructive practices.
Letts provides the characters with dialogue that is often juicy and funny, including a choice barb thrown at “the Greatest Generation,” and for the first half of his 3 1/2-hour play, it appears he is pandering to the audience with upscale sensationalism. That abruptly changes at a family dinner that follows the father’s funeral. Dad drowned in the local fishing hole, his empty boat found aimlessly floating.
Violet presides over the meal with such monstrous ferocity, setting a tone echoed by others, that we get a stunned sense of the profound pain in the room. The comic becomes tragic, and the audience makes emotional connections with the members of the Weston family victimized by their savage kin.
Real time is suspended during the show, with its three acts flying by. The Weston family may be appalling, but its members are engagingly genuine.
“August’s” three best roles are female, and Letts specifically wrote them for veteran Steppenwolf actors. That type of hand-in-glove relationship often yields extraordinary performances, and Deanna Dunagan (Violet), Rondi Reed (her sister) and Amy Morton (her oldest daughter) own those characters and the stage with an authenticity that thrills as it chills.
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