Balagan’s “August: Osage County” Makes Its Lemonade from American Lemons

Every so often a great epic of a play comes along to speak big truths about America with a punch to the gut — Death of Salesman, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Angels in America. August: Osage County aspires to belong in these ranks. Balagan’s current production (through April 27) delivers the big truths but gently.

Director Shawn Belyea and the cast keep our attention, and the production makes its points, but it’s in no hurry. It doesn’t gut-punch or get under the skin as some of those other great plays do. Rather it sits us down in our seats to take our medicine dissolved in a lemonade—a slight shock of sour chill.

There is definitely medicine to swallow here. The strengths of Tracy Letts’s script are well-documented. Its 2008 Broadway production won almost every applicable award from Pulitzer to Tony to Outer Critics Circle. Though it takes on big American themes it’s general in the declarative moments. When characters sit down and announce that they are going to say something serious about America they speak in vague terms. Letts reserves the point-making for metaphor and actions grounded in the relationships of his characters who desperately cling to false hope, wallow in stupor, or incessantly berate one another to maintain a semblance of equilibrium.

The plot concerns a series of power struggles during the re-gathering of a scattered family in the wake of the patriarch’s disappearance. Said patriarch, Bev (Charles Leggett), is an English professor and poet. His scholarship focuses on T.S. Eliot but this is not a play of afternoons measured out in coffee spoons. Osage County is closer to The Waste Land.

Most of the play lives in this barely veiled world. The play begins and ends with the Native American maid, Johnna (Jordi Montes). Bev’s wife, Violet (Shellie Shulkin), refers to her as the Indian in the attic but she is a constant presence throughout the house and story. Montes’s character supplies a counterpoint to the craziness of the family. She roots them, rescues them, and holds them together simply because she needs the work.

When the booze flows conversation veers from analysis of other members of the family to analysis of the country as a whole. The so-called Greatest Generation is dressed down in no uncertain terms but no generation escapes unscathed if only because everyone in the three generations portrayed in this family is unraveling. How and why they unravel and where and how they try to hold one another together keeps us engaged with their stories.

This engagement is facilitated by solid acting across the board. It’s a well-balanced ensemble. While the script offers meaty roles with opportunities for scenery chewing Belyea has kept everyone within the same margins.

Ahren Buhmann’s set attempts the feat of reducing a three-story house to fit under the Erickson theatre’s grid. This is largely successful though it might easily be confused with a 60s split-level. The use of GIF-like video projected on various portions of the set between scenes is less successful. Few if any seats have a view of all of these projections and they add little to the production as a whole placing focus on the familial rather than the philosophical side of the piece. The innocuous images do little more than suggest the moving pictures of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world.

Though the show ambles along it never drags. Even at three-and-a-half hours (with two intermissions), August: Osage County never lets its audience go. In fact the script slowly raises the tension through the first two acts only to unleash a storm (a slow, gently forceful storm) in the final act. It may lack the sparkle of quick-witted shows that have come before but the easy, almost casual tempo of this production makes one feel right at home—for better and for worse. Our trip to the wasteland of this American moment is as comfortable as a visit to the folks back home.