Tracy Letts: August: Osage County

If you had asked me to make a series of suppositions about the author of this gripping script, I feel that I would have done pretty well.  Both the writer and the story reveal themselves with every line, and I feel like I cheated myself out of the opportunity to be smug by looking Letts up before writing my predictions down.  Naturally, Letts is an actor.  This script is an actors' showcase in all of the best ways.  It manages to have a reason to exist outside of itself, unlike so many modern American theatrical "classics" (basically every script I read in college, but the most ghastly example I can think of is Margulies' Dinner with Friends), resulting in something like a terrarium, where the audience just observes the actors, and is expected to marvel at how lifelike they are.

But it's more specific than that.  It's not just that this script was written by an actor, but by a very certain type of highly skilled actor, for whom every line is its' own story.  The ghosts of Edward Albee and Anton Chekov are on every page, and even more so on the second reading.  I flatter myself by imagining that I could have predicted that Letts was not only an actor, but one who specializes in the works of those playwrights, as indeed he does.  Osage County is no less than a modern Desire Under the Elms, so rawly and honestly American. 

But one thing did surprise me about Letts, when I did a little research.  He's a man.  Perhaps even more than the three playwrights to whom I've compared him above, he has created women who are so true that I assumed Tracy was a woman's name.   I was so gobsmacked by this script, that I couldn't sleep until I had not only finished it, but watched the movie.  Sadly, the edges seem purposefully filed down in the screen adaptation, but even a taste of this experience was enough to make me resent my entire ancestry.  Perhaps it's best that I don't have a chance to see it on stage.