In the wake of the US election, two Pulitzer prize-winning American plays have opened simultaneously on Gadigal Country in Sydney this week: at Belvoir, Tracy Letts’ 2007 drama August: Osage County; and at Sydney Theatre Company, Lynn Nottage’s 2015 tale of fractured friendship, Sweat. Both centre on women, and both explore the legacies of economic impoverishment. Both have America on their mind.
That’s about where the similarities end. It’s easy to see why Sweat was programmed for this moment: a play that debuted on the eve of Donald Trump’s first term, set among disenfranchised steelworkers in Pennsylvania – a crucial battleground in recent US elections – and exploring the vexed intersection of class and race.
Letts’ play is a less obvious choice: a white middle class “family gathering” drama, written in the second term of the Bush administration. Yes it’s a cracker of a play: a black comedy of family dysfunction, perennially relatable – and performed here by a stellar cast led by Pamela Rabe. But of all the American plays you could program in the immediate aftermath of this particular election, it feels like an outlier – perhaps more so to audiences who saw the ultra-naturalistic, Tony award-winning Steppenwolf production that toured to Sydney in 2010. This feels like old-school American drama, in an era that arguably calls for fresh voices and perspectives.
The setting is Osage County, Oklahoma: the Plains country immortalised in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and a state that has voted Republican for the last 56 years. In the high heat of summer, three generations of the Weston family have gathered in the decrepit family home presided over by poison-tongued, pill-popping matriarch Violet (Rabe). The family’s patriarch, retired poet and full-time alcoholic Beverly (John Howard), has gone missing.
Drawn into this pressure cooker are Ivy (Amy Mathews), the dutiful but weary middle child, who lives near home; Violet’s sister Mattie Fae (Helen Thomson), Mattie Fae’s husband, Charlie (Greg Stone), and their lacklustre adult son, “Little” Charles (Will O’Mahony). There is the eldest daughter, Barbara (Tamsin Carroll), an academic, who flies in from Colorado with her husband, Bill (Bert LaBonté), and teen daughter, Jean (Esther Williams). The youngest daughter, Karen (Anna Samson), turns up with her fiance, Steve (Rohan Nichol), a slick operator involved in Middle East-related “security work”. And then there is Johnna (Bee Cruse), a young Cheyenne woman who Beverly hired to look after the housework, shortly before his disappearance.
As in all family gathering plays, tensions bubble over, grenades are lobbed and secrets are revealed. Letts, an actor and writer born and raised in Oklahoma, drew on his own torturous family history for this play and the resulting dialogue and depiction of conflict is painfully – and occasionally hilariously – spot on, even when the story veers into melodrama. The Belvoir cast perform it beautifully and the audience eat it up, wincing, laughing and gasping at key revelations.
Letts’ play posits this conflict as the product of a kind of “Midwestern sensibility” born out of the multigenerational trauma of European immigrants and their descendants scrabbling to survive on the unforgiving Plains – land that settlers ironically made less habitable by their efforts. But it has bigger things on its mind too, positioning the Westons as a kind of microcosm of the American promise gone to seed, lost in a haze of drugs, alcohol and delusion. The worst of America is seen in closeup: racism, misogyny, rampant individualism, and a wilful refusal to deal with its foundational sin – genocide.
Belvoir’s production, helmed by artistic director Eamon Flack, dials this commentary up, pushing back on the play’s naturalism and making something more nightmarish. Instead of the realistic three-storey house specified in Letts’ script, set designer Bob Cousins has created a kind of deconstructed prairie house, whose jumble of familiar elements visualises dysfunction and delusion.
Whereas Letts’ stage directions delineated scenes between different rooms of the house, this production occasionally throws adjacent scenes into the same space simultaneously – sometimes to confusing effect, particularly in the first act as various family members arrive. The sense of disorientation is compounded by this production’s decision to keep Beverly on stage for the first act, even after he has disappeared from the action – a kind of unmoored spirit.
Johnna, too, remains on stage – throughout, as Letts apparently intended she should. Her often silent presence can be read in different ways, but inevitably calls to mind the trope of the “stoic native” who absorbs the bad behaviour of the settlers while given little backstory or agency. Letts, who has said his treatment of the character is informed by his own Native American ancestry, even throws in one very literal reference, via Violet, to Johnna as the “Indian in the attic”. Still, it’s a fine line between replicating a trope and subverting it.
Flack and his team lean into this dilemma, emphasising Johnna’s presence in subtle ways, and adjusting the ending to give her more obvious power. Still, there’s a sense that the play itself is not handling this crucial aspect of the American dysfunction as well as it could – a problem that no production can quite overcome.
August: Osage County is on at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre until 15 December, then Perth’s Heath Ledger Theatre as part of Perth festival from 27 February to 16 March
