Broadway Play Review: ‘August: Osage County”
Since we were in Philly visiting family, my husband and I decided to take a day trip to NYC to see the Tony-award wining play, ‘August: Osage County,” which also won the Pulitzer for Best Play 2008. Because the setting was in Oklahoma, I was particularly intrigued by this highly acclaimed drama of the year.
Centered around a sickeningly dysfunctional family in NE Oklahoma, it is at points shocking and outrageously funny. Hailed as “the best drama in decades,” I attended with my expectations set on number 11 on a scale of 1-10.
I am glad I attended but am very surprised it has won the Pulitzer and believe Eugene O’Neill would be loudly cursing and shaking his fist at the comparison of this play to ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ and that Tennesse Williams has been done a great disservice when critics–including the The New York Times drama critic–call ’Osage County the new “Glass Menagerie.”
I must confess, ‘The Glass Menagerie” is my favorite 20thcentury American play-one I taught for many years–, and it, too, centers around a dysfunctional family, long before the word ‘dysfunctional’ was spoken. But it is a gentle and quiet narrative of people caught by circumstance and the past, with characters who are damaged but likable and tenderly vulnerable.
“Osage County” uses vociferous screaming and dropping the f-bomb at every opportunity to loudly display its dysfuntion, anger, bitterness, disillusionment, and LOUD desperation.
And from an Oklahoma’slanguage point of view, contrary to the playwright’s perception, Oklahomans do not speak with a Mississippi drawl. I kept wanting to stand up and yell: “Dialect coach! Dialect coach! Anyone need a dialect coach??!! I would be glad to serve as one! Right here and now.”
There were some uproarious surprises and some startling discoveries during the course of the play, but much was overplayed, and few were likable characters. The playwright could not decide if he were doing Carol Burnett’s ‘Mama’s Family” or a serious look at the microscopic family as representative of a world lost at sea, because of addiction, hopelessness, and pure and simple “meanness.”
I’m glad I saw it. It was very long: 3.5 hours but not tedious. Act II was the most compelling. It is worth the two for one tickets we bought, but please do not compare it to Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, for their sake and mine!
