At the very centre of Tracy Lett’s sprawling play about contemporary middle America, is a Native American woman with a leather pouch around her neck. The pouch, she explains, contains the dried remains of her umbilical cord which, if lost, would leave her spirit floating, without anchor to the world, or words to that effect. It’s easy to lose sight of Johnna Monevata in August: Osage Country. Her calm presence mostly hovers in the background of the main, turbulent action of the play but it is significant that the play begins and ends with Johnna. Her opening dialogue with the patriarch of the Weston family, whose story is the subject of the play, revolves around a line from a TS Eliot poem: ‘Life is long’. And so is the play. For over three hours, the Steppenwolf Company, an immensely talented ensemble of actors from Chicago, take the audience on a harrowing, hilarious theatrical experience which goes off with a bang and ends with a whimper.
The production has won both the Tony and Pulitzer awards, which puts it at the top of the critical tree in contemporary American theatre. And yet, August: Osage County – the title refers to the region of Oklahoma where the play is set – is a very conventional play which continues the great lineage of the psychological drama of which Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Clifford Odets, Sam Shepard and others are the exemplary exponents. Watching it at the Sydney Theatre, I was reminded of last year’s Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was also set in a rambling house in the oppressive heat of summer in which a cast of tragically flawed people played out their fragile lives. August: Osage County is that kind of play with one big difference – this play is very, very funny in a painfully incisive way. It leaves your sides and your heart aching.
The Steppenwolf Company has no parallel in Australian theatre. It is a company of 40 or so members that began in the 1970s and has gone on to become one of the seminal companies of the American theatre. We still don’t understand the value of longevitous acting ensembles, notwithstanding the nascent efforts of the STC’s The Residents troupe.This says a great deal about the lack of vision in our arts policy, especially in the moribund political swamp of NSW where the per capita expenditure on the arts is abysmally low even by comparison with other states. When a company like Steppenwolf, with its rich history and continuity of practice comes to town, audiences are understandably impressed by the high standard of the acting and it is certainly true that these actors bring an immediacy and rawness of expression to the stage. This company gives a high voltage lesson in ensemble performance.
August: Osage County depicts in theatrical form what the Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage has called, in another context, ‘narcissicistic nationalism’. By this I mean that the play dwells on a certain collective self-obsession which casts white, middle class, mid Western American experience through a forensically psychological frame. The frame is reflected in the style of the acting which, like the play text, is situated in a direct line to the psychological realism evident in classic interpretations of Albee, Williams and others. In fact, the performance style was also reminiscent of the work of film director Robert Altman.
Tracy Letts, the playwright responsible for this rendering of his homeland, has based the play on experiences and characters from his own life. The characters in the play are presented as shrill, bombastic, excessively verbose, secretive, combative and utterly self-obsessed, which some might say is a fair depiction of the way the rest of the world views Americans. But to come to that conclusion would be too unkind to the diversity and richness of American culture. Which brings me back to the Native American housekeeper Johnna Monevata with whom the play begins when she is hired by Beverly Weston, the lettered poet and patriarch in need of someone to help him manage his pill addicted, cancer suffering and explicitly racist wife, Violet. Johnna is a quiet symbol of dispossession. She needs the work, she says, and is willing to stay on and care for Violet even after the family implodes before her eyes. Johnna is connected to her past, her people and her culture in a way that the Westons will never be. But Letts allows her presence to operate very subtly, her serenity and quiet pragmatism providing a stark contrast to the thrashing and gnashing of her employers, the inheritors of the land from which her own people were expelled.If Letts had been less delicate in his treatment of the character of Johnna this play would have teetered in the romantic and lost all credibility. As it is, the play stands as an important contribution to our understanding of a fading empire.
August: Osage County
At The Sydney Theatre Company
http://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/2010/august-osage-county
Season: August 20 to September 25
