The raw emotion in the Stepenwolf’s August: Osage County is breathtaking. As in, it literally takes your breath away as if you’ve been slugged in the gut. The flow is fast, the characters are all-too real, and the problems flow almost as fast as the cheap liquor and pills. Centered around the disappearance of the father figure, August shows a reunion-of-sorts for a dysfunctional family attempting to deal with every psychological problem possible. Literally. The laundry list is almost unbelievable: suicide, divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, pedophilia. So much that the play is told in three acts, lending it a kind of epic emotional sensation. With plates flying and insults spraying, the 4th wall (really no pun intended) does little to shield the audience from the raw truths of this family’s issues. There is nowhere for us to hide, just as there is no place for the characters to go where their problems won’t follow. And the moral? There really isn’t any, unless you consider “give up- it’s not worth the effort” a moral. This is truly one for the ages, friends. Don’t miss it. As a comrade so aptly put it, playwrite Tracy Letts tried to write a classical discovery/angst play in the style of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and outdid both of them.
N.B. Letts even avoided the pitfall of using the sage Amerindian housekeeper as a moral figure- he deserves a Tony for that alone!
