Or: just when you were feeling safe in your blanket statements...
So I just saw "August: Osage County," Tracy Letts's new play, which is receiving its world premiere at Steppenwolf right now.
And it overturned all the things I've been saying about what I find interesting on stage.
I think I've spent a lot of this year getting VERY excited about plays that play with perception by playing with "what is reality" -- having evil garden gnomes appear mid-act (Devil Baby), having split-second transitions between places, playing with technology onstage, having actors play multiple characters, filling the place with ghosts, having three worlds onstage at the same time...I was beginning to feel like "three people in a room" was all well and good, but simplistic. I was also ready to state categorically that no play should go longer than about 90 minutes.
Enter "August: Osage County" in the form of a free ticket from my friend Paul. Three and a half hours. Two intermissions. A single set, built like a dollhouse, showing a whole family home. A family drama, where the trick is that nobody gets to leave the room. And it FLEW by. I mean, I was on the edge of my seat for three hours.
Granted, part of this was the acting. This was the Steppenwolf ensemble at their finest, all but chewing the furniture, playing characters who clearly sat close to their own hearts (small-town people of the Plains states). But you know what? Even some of that has to go to Tracy, who made a point of writing this play to actors he knows, to damned fine actors he knows. And who let the play be autobiographical, and who let the play break all the assumptions about what is "innovative" or "interesting" or "theatrical" that we throw around. This was a damned fine play.
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Can I also add that I saw the play again, and I still think it's really, really good, but that there's no doubt in my mind that the third act needs work?
This is the long and rambling email I sent to my good friend (jdb) about it.
Hey JDB,
I was thinking about our over-beer discussion of the thirdact yesterday, trying to figure out either (a) what isn't gelling for me or (b) how much truth I think there is to Lily and James's complaint about the "Motel Room Twist"
I agree with you that the motel room twist is important, I think for the culpability -- REAL culpability, not existential -- that it gives Violet. I think what it is is that we find out that, first, Bev spent time in motel and second, Vi knew it TOO CLOSE TOGETHER. Introduce something like the motel in the thirdact, that late, and we'll know it has to be important. But we've barely digested it before we find out why, most people are gone so there's only so much it can have to do with, and then suddenly we get the whole story. The lovely thing about the play is that a lot of the revelations are about things that have been going on for months if not years. I think the longer time we have to know about the motel and then forget about it, the more impact it will have on us as an audience when we find out that Vi knew.
The trouble with that, of course, is that you lose a reason to have the Sheriff show up in act three. That's a bummer. So you either need another, more innocuous reason, or you lose those lovely moments between Troy and Amy. But I bet Tracy could find another reason.
There's another scene in the third I love, but when it comes down to it, don't understand. I love the scene between Johnna and Barbara, where Barbara's in her father's chair and she gives Johnna a chance to quit. I love the repetition, I love that we see Johnna is capable of lying. It's the placement of the scene that bothers me. It slows things down. And yes, the whole thirdact is slow. If, as Paula Vogel says, you invent the structure of your play with each play, then hell Tracy, do whatever you want. But I think the solution in Act Three isn't to cut within scenes -- I gotta say, I missed every cut -- I think it's to cut entire scenes, or push what is necessary in them earlier in the play. Barbara could have sat down with Johnna AT ANY POINT IN THE PLAY, given the majority of their conversation, even before she was "running things." It wouldn't have hurt us to see that Johnna was capable of lying earlier -- might even be interesting given the skillet-to-the-head moment -- and I guess the whole thing left me wondering whether Barbara was supposed to be turning into Mom, Dad, both, neither? Without the Johnna scene, it's Mom. With the Johnna scene we get the ghost of dad, but we never saw the father act like Barbara does during the rest of the act...
Act Three is still covering SO much ground. Some of it has to be that way, but I think any ground that can be pushed earlier into the other two acts would help the play.
That said, God I love this play, everyone in it, Tracy for writing it, Anna for her brilliant direction of it. I also love thinking about it when I'm supposed to be asleep.
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