AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

By Diana Simmonds

November 15 2024

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Belvoir St Theatre Company and Black Swan Theatre Company at Upstairs Belvoir, 9 November-15 December 2024. Photography by Brett Boardman

In 2007, the USA was mired in George W Bush’s existential “War on Turr”. Also in what the Brookings Institute called “America’s geography of poverty”. It was a time of economic turmoil and social disquiet as the ideals and comfortable fabric of the American Dream frayed at the edges. At this curious time, Tracy Letts presented Chicago’s Steppenwolf company with a mammoth “tragicomedy”. The script turned these inklings of doom into a family saga of both intimate and epic proportions. Enigmatically titled August: Osage County, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2008 and has since become a theatre legend.

In programming the play to end Belvoir’s 2024 season, artistic director Eamon Flack – and director of the production – set a high bar for audience and actors alike. It runs for 3.5 hours including two intervals, and Flack’s company doesn’t lose its grip on the audience for a minute. The casting is superb, led by Pamela Rabe as seemingly malevolent matriarch Violet Weston. While Rabe has captured public imagination in recent times as the arch bitch of Wentworth, one could bet that those fans may not be aware of her comedic skills. This talent is used to the full as Violet’s mouth cancer and addiction to prescription painkillers loosen her tongue in more ways than one.

After patriarch and poet Beverly Weston (John Howard) possibly goes on a fishing trip but definitely doesn’t return, the three Weston daughters, husbands, and offspring in tow, arrive to comfort and care for Violet in the stultifying heat of a non-airconditioned Oklahoma summer. As is always the case in family sagas, Ivy (Amy Mathews) is the one who stays close to home to become the resentful carer. Karen (Anna Samson) is the glamour puss who lives in Florida and is engaged to rich Steve (Rohan Nichol). Barbara (Tamsin Carroll) is the sensitive one whose husband Bill (Bert Labonté) is having an affair with a student and whose daughter Jean (Esther Williams) is a pot-smoking teen trouble magnet.

Of course, there’s Violet’s younger sister, social climber and lifelong rival Mattie Fae Aiken (Helen Thomson), and her son, known as Little Charles (Will O’Mahony) – to differentiate him from his father Charlie Aiken (Greg Stone). Sheriff Deon Gilbeau (Johnny Nasser) arrives to announce that Beverly has been found – dead – and simultaneously reawakens a high school frisson in Barbara.

Observing the shenanigans and producing food and drink on demand is Johnna (Bee Cruse) a young Native American hired by Beverly to take care of his wife, unknown to the sisters. She is the catalyst for exquisitely awful and oblivious racism as well as a beautifully modulated setting of the family dining table and famous fried chicken funeral dinner in the middle act. Mainly, however, she watches as the Weston clan tears holes in hearts and psyches and the myth of the happy family, mostly to the accompaniment of disconcerted laughter.

Letts’ talent to amuse is translated into a talent to abuse as Violet unleashes insults and slander in all directions, and family secrets and scandals are revealed: “Nobody slips anything by me” she snarls. At the same time, Helen Thomson’s stitched-up Mattie-Fae sets free her atrocious mongrel harridan to match her sister in glorious dreadfulness.

When it comes to dreadful, the set is possibly the worst looking, least coherent or actor-friendly of many a year. Nevertheless, lighting designer Morgan Moroney effectively does what’s possible in the circumstances. Ella Butler’s multi-fashioned costumes work well for each character. And composer and sound designer Rachael Dease drops in notes of poignancy and era-specific music.

In the end, however, August: Osage County is all about the Weston women. The weight of the comedy and the tragedy underlying the laughter depends on them. It’s a given that Pamela Rabe and Helen Thomson are hilariously, painfully, shockingly superb. As well, it’s great to see Tamsin Carroll in a nuanced and meaty role, and as Barbara she’s exceptional. Anna Samson’s Karen is a perilously comical Karen; Bee Cruse and Esther Williams are equally solid and unselfish in their unshowy anchoring roles.

And for once, it’s the role of the men to be unselfish in support and stand back as the real fireworks go off in every direction. Ironically it makes for a fine ensemble: the Westons and their hapless satellites are enthralling. The audience laughs until coming to a screeching halt. As Barbara says, “Thank god we can’t tell the future, or we’d never get out of bed.” Recommended without reservation.