Osage County comes to Portland

Tracy Letts is personally responsible for much of the sass I’ve gotten from playwrights in recent years. For decades I’ve said: look, there are a few simple “don’ts” you should follow if you want to be produced. These include:

Three-act plays
Large casts
Kitchen sink dramas about dysfunctional families

Then along comes Steppenwolf and Mr. Letts and August: Osage County, and Q.E.D., come to find out this form, like any other, can be electrifying in the hands of exceptional talent.


Which is not to stay that plays that require 13 actors are any more producible than they used to be. (It will be telling to see how many regional companies slate the play for their seasons once the rights are available.) But can this kind of theater (realistic, sprawling, etc.) still speak to us? Oh yeah.

Now August: Osage County has come to Portland, as a whistle stop in its national tour, to roost for five days at the cavernous Keller Auditorium. Which amounts to a fresh test for the Pulitzer-winning juggernaut. Does the venue swallow up an intimate drama? Will people go to the Keller, which is more often associated with shows like Camelot, for a no-holds-barred drama? Yes and yes.

Tonight’s run was well-attended and warmly received, notwithstanding the Keller’s sound problems. In Act 2 especially, when the family matriarch (played in full-out, pull-no-punches style by larger than life Estelle Parsons) lets the family weaklings have it, the Weston family’s shenanigans are breathtaking.


The outstanding cast (which includes two former Oregonians, Laurence Lau from Lake Oswego High and Paul Vincent O’Connor, formerly of OSF) shines. But no one outshines Estelle, who gets to offer up as vile a cesspool of botulism as you’ll ever see. Or ever wish you’d thought to say yourself. It was great fun tonight to hear some people gasping and others laughing out loud…all at the same lines.

Take note: Portland’s share of the national tour is brief, playing only through this Sunday, October 25. And unlike Camelot, this is one show where you’ll be glad you ponied up for the orchestra seats. Not all the play’s significance lies in its words; you will want to see these characters’ faces.

Theater Row

Literary managers everywhere, let us congratulate ourselves. We’ve landed at last. After years of being considered too minor to merit mention at all, in recent months LitMen & Women have made the lists of those currently considered blameworthy for the state of the American theater.

The latest jeremiad comes from today’s New York Times – in the Letters column of the curiously named Arts & Leisure section. A playwright inveighing against the success of August: Osage County opines:

I do not think it is only the writers who, as Mr. Letts says, are at fault for a “lack of bravery,” but it is also the lack of vision of artistic directors and literary managers across the country who are conforming to the basest levels of mediocrity in our culture. And they come up seasonal mush, theater that is far from provocative and for which the audience does not have to think.

Wouldn’t it be grand to wield the power this writer ascribes to Literary Departments? If only, if only… Well, he jumps on a popular bandwagon. Pundits from Richard Nelson to Mike Daisey are pointing the finger at literary managers these days. Not to mention that critic from Atlanta who claimed a local playwright’s popularity was the creation of a dramaturgy cartel!

The charges could actually seem sort of … sweet. Were they were not so risible. And ungrateful. You have to wonder where many a writer would be today without the assiduous promotion of the wee little literary folk. Personally? I’ve lobbied for both the above-mentioned writers frequently in the past, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

I’m rethinking that now.