August: Osage County in New York City September 27, 2008

Images: Cast of August: Osage County and production poster [www.time.com, http://www.playbill.com/, http://www.verbosecoma.com/]

After a good friend saw this show in June and had the unbelievable chance to go backstage and meet star Estelle Parsons, I knew I had to put it on my must-see list (nevermind it won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama!) It did not disappoint, providing me with over 3 hours of pure dramatic fun in the form of a black comedy about one of the more dysfunctional families ever to grace the American stage. The Weston family of Osage County, Oklahoma live in a large three story old-fashioned wooden farmhouse outside of Tulsa, where patriarch Beverly has had a so-so career as an English professor at the university. We meet him in a long opening monologue about his life, his drunkeness, his wife and daughters, to a mostly silent native-American young woman named Johnna, whom he is hiring as a housekeeper and cook. Johnna will have her work cut out for her, as Beverly promptly goes missing and turns up dead...a planned suicide. We soon meet the three daughters, two sons-in-law and one grand-daughter, and an aunt, uncle and cousin, who return home for their father/brother-in-law/uncle's funeral and to comfort their difficult mother/sister/aunt Violet. Violet, a formidable pill-popper (echoes of the mother in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey), is both unbelievably vicious and unspeakably pathetic as she sets out to attack each of her three daughters and other assorted characters throughout the play. This culminates in a funeral dinner scene that must be seen to be believed, where Violet manages to reduce all of her daughters either to tears or rage (or both), even to physical assault.

At the heart of the play is the Westons' oldest daughter Barbara, a strong and intelligent woman who watches and does her best to intervene as her life falls apart around her. Her husband is screwing a student, her daughter is 14 and up to no good, her beloved father has offed himself and her mother infuriates and sucks the life out of her. Her sisters don't fare much better: Ivy is the only one who's stayed nearby and her life has been a lonely disappointment (until she falls for her sweet but ineffectual cousin Little Charles); Karen has moved to Florida and become a real estate agent whose desperate search for love has led her to a very suspect choice. The play ends with each and every character finally finding the strength to walk away from this toxic place, with Barbara being the very last one to leave her mother, without a word. The play's final moments show a bewildered and frightened Violet searching the house for her absent family, ending up comforted in the arms of Johnna, the caregiver Beverly hired for this very purpose.

Playwright Tracy Letts and this production from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre--without a doubt one of the very best theatre companies in America--have crafted a wonderful piece of theatre. There is never a dull moment throughout this long play, and each scene crackles along with the energy emanated by all these spectactularly unhappy people. Revelations appear, confessions are offered, recriminations are fired and this cast and their director Anna D. Shapiro are up to all of them. I was surprised by how funny the play is, how often I found myself laughing and being appalled at the same moment. Is it a great play? I think not: the cast is too large and unwieldy for us to really dive deeply into individual psychologies and some plot turns seem added in by the playwright simply for the shock/fun factor (potential incest and underage sexual assault being the most egregious examples). If the play was stripped down a bit and the more Gothic elements excised, we might then have something to hold up against far greater American plays about unhappy families: Long Day's Journey, Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman or All My Sons (the latter is in previews on Broadway), Buried Child, not to mention Chekov and Ibsen. I saw Pinter's The Birthday Party in its Broadway revival production last December; now there's a play about a dysfunctional family for you!

It is difficult to mention stand-out performances as this is such an ensemble piece, but the trio of daughters are all Steppenwolf ensemble members and it shows. What a treat to be a long-term member of such a strong company, where the quality of acting is so high. Amy Morton as Barbara carries off a gruelling role with a blend of fury, grief and vulnerability. Estelle Parsons plays Violet as seemingly mild, but with a serpent's tongue, plus she has comic physicality and timing that make the most of her role. The men have smaller roles in this female-dominated play (a rarity!), but I really enjoyed the work of Robert Foxworth as Uncle Charlie, Frank Wood as Barbara's straying spouse, Brian Kerwin as Karen's creepy fiance and Jim True-Frost as the damaged but hopeful cousin Little Charlie. The openwork set design by Todd Rosenthal is both attractive and effective.

Estelle Parsons stepped forward during our ovation at curtain call to tell us that Paul Newman had died that morning at his home in Connecticut at the age of 83. He met his future wife Joanne Woodward onstage in the very theatre we were in---Broadway's Music Box Theatre---in the premiere production of William Inge's Picnic in 1951. She told us that the cast had agreed to dedicate their performances that day to his memory. No doubt the great Newman would have enjoyed (as much as I did) every minute.

Let Me Down Easy with Anna Deavere Smith at ART September 23, 2008

Anna Deavere Smith in Let Me Down Easy at the American Repertory Theatre

September 12 - October 11, 2008.

Photos credit: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/theater/reviews/22easy.html

What a pleasure and a privilege to see this wonderful artist-ethnographer in action in her latest play. Deavere Smith has made a career out of conducting hundreds of interviews on a particular topic or in a particular location. She then painstakingly recreates the physical and vocal qualities and mannerisims of her interviewees into one-woman productions that offer 25 or more characters apiece. She is best-known for her shows Twilight: Los Angeles and Fires in the Mirror, both of which dealt head-on with racial unrest and injustice in American society.

This new play is somewhat of a departure for Deavere Smith as she set out to question more philosophical questions around mortality, embodiment and a concept that became central to this self-described "play in evolution"; the concept of grace. What is it? Where does it come from? How do we experience it? These are the questions that drove Deavere Smith's 300 (!)interviews with a wide range of subjects: priests, rabbis, Buddhist monks and imams (not surprisingly); a jockey and horse trainer (more surprisingly); survivors of the Rwandan genocide; musicians; scholars and philosophers; great opera diva Jessye Norman; former Texan governor and cancer patient Ann Richards. All are fully rendered in monologues that circle around her key theme, offering a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives and stories.

Deavere Smith has a powerful stage presence that commands an unwavering attention over the two and a half hour show. She speaks directly to the audience (sometimes, briefly, as herself) as she portrays each interview subject, backed by an effective set design of a rough and uneven corrugated iron wall that opens onto a screen featuring images and an occasional video to support the action or establish a setting. Stage hands bring on and take off costume pieces and props for Deavere Smith, but this is never an attempt to 'fool' the audience; everything happens in full view. And, unless she puts on shoes to help her establish a character more fully, Deavere Smith is barefoot, an aesthetic choice that resonated with me around the choruses of ancient Greece bearing witness to great events as they dance barefoot in a circle together. There is that deep sense of participating in a more ritual-ized form of theatre when watching Deavere Smith at work.

She is a fascinating actor, and not because she is that good a one. She has a powerful voice and all the technical skills necessary, but I did not experience her work as that of an actor with the capability to seemingly morph into other people. For me, there was always something of the actor in every character, as accurate and most often believable I found each incarnation to be. Is this a conscious Brechtian alienation effect that Deavere Smith is employing, reminding her audience that everything is constructed, false, that the truth of this experience really lay in her original encounters with these participants, that anything else is a mere representation? Perhaps, and that is one way to read her work. However, as a researcher myself, I read a sister-researcher at work here, using her art form of theatre to best represent the lived experiences of her interviewees. The fine attention to detail I saw in her representations tells me she studied the interview tapes in depth, and called upon the actor's skill of memory-recall, in order to include each person's vocal mannerisms, their hesitations, tics, pauses, laughs, silences. In this way, her ethnographic portraits are far more accurate and convincing than a researcher limited to written forms is able to be. Any graduate student in the social sciences or humanities should see a Deavere Smith show, preferably live, but her earlier shows are readily available on DVD. She has a lot to teach about the fine art of researching other people.

As for the show itself? It definitely is "a play in evolution" as I felt the first act was outstanding and the second somewhat of a letdown. Deavere Smith appears to have fallen into the easy research trap of trying to cram too much data into the final report! Although she has limited her selection to 30 of the 300 interviews, she still seems to be trying to make all the pieces 'fit' together. The problem I saw in Act Two lies in a section that deals with the medical system and features interviews with doctors and patients around what's both right and wrong with the ways we care for our own and other peoples' bodies in crisis. While I enjoyed this section of the show, I did feel that we began to move somewhat farther away from the central theme of grace that was so well established and explored in Act One. It felt to me that this section might be the beginning of another show on this topic, but where it sits right now it leads me away from a topic with which I was fully engaged and wanted more.

Interestingly, in a post-show panel featuring Deavere Smith, chaired by Harvard's Homi Babha, one panelist mentioned (quite rightly) that if she wanted to keep centred on the theme of grace while looking at the medical system, Deavere Smith would do well to interview nurses. And hospice workers, I might add! So maybe that is how this play will keep evolving, maybe not.

The memories I will carry with me as my archive of this performance (a concept from performance theorist Herbert Blau in his book The Audience) is of her recreating testimony from African subjects, particularly those who lived through the Rwandan genocide, survivors and perpetrators both. When a young girl, now a college student in the US, speaks through Deavere Smith about her ability to forgive those who murdered her family to "let them go", I am given the gift of understanding grace in a whole new way. For this and many other dramatic insights along the way--the death of a horse, the beauty of a garden, the power of art to lift and transform suffering--I am grateful to have had the opportunity to have been graced for a short time in the presence of a great American artist.