Not Since What Ever Happened
to Baby Jane?
By Alexis Greene
August: Osage County
By Tracy Letts
Imperial Theatre
249 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
Not since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?--the
1962 horror film starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis as two vicious
sisters--have women been portrayed so downright evilly as they are in
Tracy Letts's new drama, August: Osage County.
Well, that's probably an exaggeration. In the
theater, there have been Miss Alice, the calculating devil incarnate
of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, and the vile mother in Martin
McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Lenane. Still, when Charles
Isherwood of the New York Times writes in his rapturous review
of Letts's play, "this is theater that continually keeps you hooked
with shocks, surprises and delights," the "you" is possibly not the
women who make up at least 50 percent of the audience at the Imperial
Theatre and, we are often told, are the main purchasers of Broadway
theater tickets.
I cannot speak for all women, of course, but
this critic could not watch Letts's three hours plus of women screaming,
bitching, cursing, and even, at one point, attempting strangulation,
without being just a little disturbed by the images being paraded across
the stage.
To summarize the plot for those who have not
yet seen this latest import from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company:
August: Osage County takes place in the large home of the Westons,
who live outside of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, sixty miles from Tulsa. As the
play begins, an aging and alcoholic writer named Beverly Weston (Dennis
Letts, the playwright's father) is hiring a young Native American housekeeper
named Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero) to take care of his pill-addicted wife,
Violet (Deanna Dunagan). We soon learn that Beverly has disappeared
and committed suicide, leaving his wife, her sister Mattie Fae Aiken
(Rondi Reed), and Violet and Beverly's three grown daughters to muddle
along as best they can. Johnna, it seems, was employed with Beverly's
permanent leave-taking in mind.
At first I was impressed that Letts had peopled
his stage with so many women. After all, this is Broadway, and this
is the American theater, where plays about women are comparatively rare
commodities unless written by women themselves.
But as the savage insults poured from Violet,
her sister and notably from Violet's educated daughter Barbara (Amy
Morton), and as it became clear that all the adult women in this family
were mean, dysfunctional or both--Letts's profusion of women looked
less and less appealing. To be sure, no dramatist, man or woman, is
obligated to write so-called positive portraits of anybody. But at the
same time I, as a critic and a feminist, feel obligated to point out
and try to analyze what I see in front of me on the stage.
Letts strongly suggests, for instance, that
the women's ferocity toward each other is inescapable. Violet and Mattie
Fae's long-dead mother was apparently as brutish as Violet is to her
three daughters and as Mattie Fae is to her only child, a son named
Little Charles (Ian Barford). Barbara berates her only daughter--pot-smoking
fourteen-year-old Jean (Madeleine Martin)--just as mercilessly. As for
Barbara's sisters, Ivy (Sally Murphy) and Karen (Mariann Mayberry),
their particular brand of dysfunction surfaces in their poor relationships
with men and impoverished attitudes toward themselves. At the end Violet
is deserted by her three daughters, but the daughters' futures hold
little possibility for happiness (Barbara probably kills herself, as
her father did). Letts's message is that these women's behavior cannot
change--certainly not while they are around each other.
The men in August: Osage County are
passive-aggressive recipients of this female brutality. They deal with
these women either by avoiding them, seeking affection and sexual gratification
elsewhere or, in Beverly's case, leaving the picture completely. Beverly
apparently survived with Violet not only by drinking but also by having
an affair with Violet's sister (a plot complication that Letts drops
in, melodramatically, out of nowhere). Barbara's husband Bill (Jeff
Perry) is having an affair with one of his students back in Colorado,
and Karen's middle-aged fiancé (Brian Kerwin) puts the make on fourteen-year-old
Jean.
While none of that behavior is particularly admirable,
in two cases--Beverly and Bill--the affairs happen either in the past
or off-stage, so that, in contrast to the women's unpleasant behavior,
we do not see it right in front of us. Indeed, the men are considerably
quieter, both vocally and temperamentally, than the women they have
had the misfortune to marry. It takes almost the entire play for these
men to stand up to the Weston women, and when they do the implication
is that the women had it coming. Bill, for instance, essentially rescues
his daughter from Barbara by taking Jean home with him and leaving Barbara
for good.
If the women in this play were not so reprehensible,
the men's failings might be more apparent. As it is, we can't blame
the men for being scared of their wives and mothers, for they are truly
a fearsome lot. At the performance I attended, every time one of the
women seemed to get her just deserts (particularly the matriarch Violet)
a cheer went up from the audience.
Stop and think: do we really want a play where
everybody in the audience roars with approval when a woman gets her
comeuppance?
Mainstream critics who have raved about Letts's
play compare the writing to that of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill.
So let's go with that bit of hyperbole for a minute. To be sure, Amanda
in The Glass Menagerie is a vengeful woman, careless of her
children's feelings. But Williams gives us enough of Amanda's Southern
belle history and enough insight into her poverty and determination
to help us understand and even empathize with her, despite her cruelty.
Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night
is, on one level, a selfish woman, and we understand her sons' and her
husband's anger toward her. But O'Neill knew that even the most suffering
families are complicated entities, their emotional histories so complex
that it is impossible to sort out the good and the bad, the kind and
the cruel. Mary Tyrone is both loved and hated by her family; she is
a victim as well as a perpetrator.
In August: Osage County, we have little
empathy for any of the women. The most vocal and aggressive are not
three-dimensional characters but viragos. The less aggressive are simply
punching bags.
At the end of the play, we cannot help but wonder
what Letts intends us to take away from this dramatic stew. The only
functioning person left standing is the Native American Johnna, who
has apparently proved her goodness by cooking excellent meals, saying
little and tolerating Jean's pot-smoking in a kind of live-and-let-live
way.
In the production's final image, Violet finds
her way up two flights of stairs to the attic room where Johnna is sitting
on the bed, reading a book. Curling up in a fetal position, Violet puts
her head in Johnna's lap, ironically seeking comfort from somebody she
has insulted throughout the play.
In contrast to the white European's historical
treatment of the American Indian, Johnna is the only person whom Violet
has not succeeded in killing off, symbolically or literally. The playwright,
however, has long since killed off our tolerance for his vituperative,
one-dimensional women.