August: Osage County
Soulpepper Theatre Company
Cushman Collected

There is a special theatrical joy in seeing a large company of actors fused together in pursuit of a common goal. It can be especially intense when the audience brings to the occasion its collective memories of the performers’ work in other shows. Familiar ingredients acquire a new tang when shaken together in fresh combinations. There is a danger of cosiness setting in if the material is insufficiently challenging but, whatever doubts one might harbour about August: Osage County, nobody could claim that Tracy Letts’ twelve-year old Broadway barnstormer, which sets thirteen sharply-drawn characters a-jangling for close on four hours, lacks challenge.

Jackie Maxwell’s Soulpepper revival is an ensemble triumph to rank with her Canadian Stage production of London Road. That show assembled a stunning cast from all points of what I once described as “Toronto’s floating ensemble”, Toronto here taken to include the Shaw and Stratford festivals. The Osage County casting is less eclectic, mostly drawing on familiar Soulpepper actors of various vintages, including two of the company’s twelve founding members plus a thirteenth who has been there as long as any of them, but it also includes a few newcomers who bring distinctive histories of their own. I found myself thinking more highly of the play itself than when I saw it on its post-Broadway tour (which was comparably well acted) or with its second Broadway cast (which wasn’t). The characters seemed richer, in part because my experience of the actors playing them was richer. Letts’ play, set on the parched plains of Oklahoma, is in the venerable tradition of tormented American family dramas (“dysfunctional” seems rather a mild word in this context, and anyway when did you last see a play about a functional family?) and the second of its three acts concludes with a grand family dinner. It’s a spectacular display on two levels: the interaction of the players which is seamless, the rampant discord of those they play, which is thoroughly seamy. All but two of the characters are present; of the absentees, one doesn’t belong to the household and the other has kicked the play off by wandering rather decisively out of it.   

The latter, the play’s effective prologue, is Beverly Weston, one-time poet, full-time professor, and disconsolate in both avocations; as this defeated philosophical soak, in whom quiet desperation becomes quiet despair, Diego Matamoros caps yet another round of memorable Soulpepper performances. (Already this year he has turned thought into passion as a more engaged academic in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and has given me more sheer pleasure than any other actor this season with his intemperate taxi-dispatcher in the “Victoria Station” segment of the company’s masterful Pinter anthology Little Menace.) By the time dinner is served, we will have learned that Beverly has drowned himself, leaving his widow Violet to assume position at the head of the table, the family, and the play. Nancy Palk, who must by now have played all the major matriarchs of American drama, finds an entirely new voice and face for this one. Or rather an entirely new set of voices and faces. Violet is a drug- addict whose moods change according to how many pills she has recently popped and who is accusing her of it.  She can appear open-hearted, maternally glad to see everyone at this family reunion. And then, suddenly, her countenance can become an extraordinary mask of hatred, beaming bitterness at the family members who have left her, or may be about to leave her, alone. She can seem genuinely, even touchingly, puzzled at the refusal of others to see things as she does. And when their incomprehension becomes too much, she can lose all control with what must be the scariest combination of volume and velocity that this actress has ever unleashed. 

That would be enough in itself to make a thrilling second-act curtain, but it’s matched in decibels and in pure passionate impact by Maev Beaty who plays Barbara, the eldest of  Violet’s three daughters and one of the two who has moved away and has returned, ostensibly to give moral and physical support. Her patience, which was probably never abundant, now snaps; she yells that from now on she is in charge. Act Three reveals that being in charge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Barbara is accompanied by an unfaithful husband, significantly another academic, who nurses hopes of repairing bridges; Beaty and Kevin Hanchard make this couple’s manoeuvrings between reproach and rapprochement painfully believable, while Leah Doz as their bruised daughter, also along  for the ride, observes them with cool teenage contempt, always likely to flair into hot teenage resentment. Beaty, a superb comedienne whose most searching performances are always edged with wit, makes Barbara a woman who can never cure herself of expecting the worst and who greets it, always, with a vocal and physical shrug.

The daughter who stayed home is Ivy, played by Michelle Monteith with what seems at first like placid serenity: another mask that lifts dramatically when a long-cherished hope of happiness, meaning escape, is brutally shattered. Monteith, who can do heartbreak like nobody else, duly breaks ours, the more so because her reaction is desperate defiance. It’s with her character that Letts’ three sisters, at least in this production, come closest to Chekhov’s. They come farthest in the person of Karen, the one who left with the fewest regrets, and who has apparently gone through a series of unsuitable men, of whom the latest is played with appropriate oiliness by Ari Cohen. Violet has her own sister, name of Mattie Fae, blowsy and bullying and harbouring, naturally, dark secrets of her own.   Both Raquel Duffy as Karen and Laurie Paton as Mattie play in a vein of Deep Thespian Southern that’s broader than anything around them, as well as being, at least to my ear, slightly off geographically. They may rock the production’s boat a bit but there is no danger of them capsizing it.

Mattie Fae has a husband and a son, both named Charles, the son known as Little Charles and treated by nearly everyone, especially his mother, as if he were half-witted. They are, by and large, the nicest people around, and they share the play’s most affecting scene, one distinguished by its participants actually liking one another. Oliver Dennis, Soulpepper’s aforementioned thirteenth apostle, is all tactful consideration as Big Charles; Gregory Prest is immensely touching as the little one. Also refreshingly free of apparent malice is the second man who didn’t come to dinner, the local sheriff, a once and possibly future flame of Barbara’s; he’s played, with a sturdy mix of public punctilio and private diffidence, by Jeff Meadows.

One character remains, and she does so literally, since she’s there at the start, listening to Beverly, and there at the end, ministering to Violet. In between, she’s tending to the entire Weston family, serving their meals, binding their wounds, intervening violently when physical disaster threatens, while still keeping a psychic distance from them. She’s Johnna Monevata, the young Native American woman (or “Indian” as Violet calls her until the more sensitive of her relatives put her right), whom Beverly thoughtfully engages to look after things when he’s gone; he also bequeaths her a fondness for T. S. Eliot. She too is admirably played, by Samantha Brown whose discreetly forceful presence keeps her in our minds even when she is physically absent. In fact Maxwell’s production makes a better job of this than did the Broadway original, even though that had the advantage of a three-level set from whose top tier Johnna in her attic room could survey the antics of her employers when they didn’t immediately require her services. (Soulpepper’s stage likely couldn’t accommodate such a structure, but Camellia Koo’s revolving set is a confusing compromise between realism and abstraction: the evening’s one real weakness.) Johnna’s role casts the self-absorbed squabbles of the Westons in an intriguingly ironic light, but it’s a stretch from that to interpret the play as a full-blooded commentary on white American guilt. The author, I suspect, might like us to but he hasn’t done the work; just setting the play in Oklahoma (the former “Indian Territory”) doesn’t make the connection all by itself. American drama has, after all, been showing us disordered families for decades; their problems can’t all be traced to their living on stolen land. In fact the play’s portentous title isn’t earned; little of it depends on either the season and even less on the place. The country-and-Westons, as I cannot stop myself from thinking of them, would have screwed up one another’s lives, in any location or in any month.

 Forget the pretensions. Letts, a fine actor himself, has constructed a great machine for acting in: a crackling melodrama, liberally laced with dark comedy, whose resort to last-minute revelations of deep dark sexual secrets bothers me far less than it used to. (Of course when you’ve heard them before they’re no longer revelations, which may make them more acceptable.) I even managed for the first time to discern some faint rays of hope in the play’s ending, at least for the three sisters. Barbara, Ivy, Karen: each of them seems set to depart the August landscape with what might be the man of her choice. Of course one never knows what might happen come September.