Review – August: Osage County

Megan Leitch, Wendy Noel and Karin Konoval as the Weston sisters.

- by Shawn Conner

Usually, anything over 89 minutes causes me to start looking for the Exit signs. Titanic? See you later. A Bruce Springsteen concert? I’m leaving after “Thunder Road” (which, hopefully, is at the show’s midway mark). And if a novel doesn’t grab me in the first chapter, back to the laundry room it goes.

So believe me when I say, at three hours, August: Osage County flies by, and leaves you wanting more.

The Arts Club Theatre production doesn’t start off that way – although the writing (the play was written by Tracy Letts, who also wrote Bug and the more recent Superior Donuts) is strong from the start, our introduction to the story comes through a halting, not very convincing monologue by actor Sean Allen. Allen, who looks way too young and non-alcoholic for the part, plays Beverly, the patriarch of the Weston family. He’s setting us up by telling the story of his family to the audience and to, onstage, Johnna, a young Cheyenne girl.

But when those two fade and the play focuses on the Weston daughters and especially Vi (Violet), Beverly’s wife, August: Osage County shudders into a psycho/dysfunctional-family, secrets-revealing black comedy where the quips, insults and rejoinders come at a furious pace.

Similarly, new characters keep coming at us until the second act. But the audience is never disoriented or confused; the three sisters, the blowzy aunt and the ineffectual uncle and first cousin, the academic husband, the sleazy boyfriend, the anti-social niece, and the more-than-just-a-rube sheriff are all precisely and humanely delineated by Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning dialogue, Janet Wright’s unobtrusive direction and the cast’s solid, sometimes brilliant, performances. The set, by Ted Roberts, is the two-story interior of the Weston house, all angles and darkened corners that become illuminated as the action moves from room to room.

Especially good are McLellan as Vi and Karin Konoval as Barbara, the most Vi-like daughter; their “truth-telling” (Vi’s term) scenes together are electric, and not to be missed by theatre-lovers or anyone who likes to see grand dames of the floorboards go head-to-head in a barb-throwing  (no pun intended) contest. When these two go at it, all we, and the rest of the cast, can do, is duck.

Go see August: Osage County (on now until Feb 27 at the Stanley at 2750 Granville Street; click here for tickets). It’s hard to imagine a better, darker, funnier way to spend a night (or an afternoon).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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