“August: Osage County” heats up Benedum with intense family drama

“August: Osage County”

Starring: Estelle Parsons, Shannon Cochran

Starring: Estelle Parsons, Shannon Cochran

Benedum Center

April 6–11

$27.50-$49.75 through Pitt Arts

If there is one theme that has been done to death not only in theater, but in all mediums of entertainment, it’s the dysfunctional family.

We all know how a messed-up family looks, feels and sounds. Either we are part of one or we know someone who is. Regardless, watching such familiar territory played out on stage often seems forced at best or completely inaccurate at worst.

That’s why it is so thrilling to see a play that not only gets it right but also succeeds so much that it rises above every other family-based drama out there. Tracy Lett’s Tony and Pulitzer award-winning play, “August: Osage County,” will make you do everything watching a truly great piece of theater should: You’ll laugh hysterically, you’ll grip your armrest because of the intensity and you will walk out of the Benedum unable to get this f*cked-up family off your mind.

As the play opens, Beverly, the aging alcoholic patriarch of the Weston family, spouts off T.S. Eliot — “This is the Way the World Ends,” — to a young American Indian woman he hires to keep the house in order, but more importantly, to watch over his wife, Violet.

Violet Weston, played by Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons, is a bumbling and acid-tongued pill addict who happens to have mouth cancer. When she is at her most intoxicated, she slurs through words with an uncomfortably realistic inflection.

Soon, however, Beverly disappears, and slowly the entire Weston clan — along with peripheral husbands and fiances — arrives, and the play really begins to rattle the skeletons in the collective family closet.

There’s oldest daughter Barbara, a tightly wound professor who is secretly separated from her husband (who cheated on her with one of his students). Ivy is the middle daughter, the one who never left the small Oklahoma town. Karen is the youngest, who obviously missed out on the intelligence and wit genes that so many of the other family members constantly make use of.

Of course, there are other characters, all of whom are totally necessary for the organic progression of the play’s drama — again, something rarely found in a piece with such a large cast.

It’s impossible to delve any further into the intricacies of each family member, however, because so much of the play’s effect derives from the gradual unveiling of plot points and character nuance. Who you like in the first act will undoubtedly change by the play’s end, which is good, because it keeps the three-hour running time moving at a pace more brisk than any other piece of theater I have seen.

Every actor in the production brings his A-game, and none of the supporting characters let their performances melt into caricatures, another unfortunate tendency of ensemble dramas. Parsons and Cochran, however, are so electrifyingly engaging that the audience hangs on their every barbed comment and harsh insult. Whereas a less capable actress than Cochran would rely on simply raising her volume for dramatic emphasis, it is evident that Cochran packs emotional punch behind her more scathing lines.

That leads me to the best part of “August: Osage County” — the script. Letts, a personal favorite of mine since the searing “Bug,” has an unnatural gift for writing dialogue, and what he chooses to include and exclude in terms of scene and exposition results in a near-perfect play. There are lines in the play, especially those in the explosive second act dinner scene, that literally made my jaw drop. They are incredibly harsh, but their roots in realism — so many characters were almost exact replicas of members of my own family — steer “August” away from melodrama and into grittier, more honest waters.

The set is fairly simple, with a basic multiroom house set up on the floor and a multistory cross-section of the house in the background, but it proves an effective tool for staging and blocking. The lighting is also effective — though the entire set is rarely dark, specific sections of the stage are lit to show the action of that particular scene. The rest of the family is always present, and engaged, in the shadows.

“August: Osage County” is a show that you can’t think of how to recommend other than offering superlatives like, “It’s probably the best play I’ve ever seen.” It sounds exaggerated, but spend an evening with the Weston family, and you’ll understand what I mean.

Just as every character leaves the play unsettled and changed — usually for the worse — you will leave more apprehensive than ever about the next family gathering.