August: Osage County Author: Visit Amazon's Tracy Letts Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1559363304 | Format: EPUB
August: Osage County Description
Review
'Sensationally entertaining...Tracy Letts' fiercely funny, turbo-charged tragicomedy is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years.' New York Times'Best American drama of the past decade' (USA Today).
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug and Man From Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where "August: Osage County" premiered.
- Paperback: 152 pages
- Publisher: Theatre Communications Group; First Edition edition (February 1, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1559363304
- ISBN-13: 978-1559363303
- Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Debuting in 2007, Tracy Letts' AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY was an instant critical success, and many compared Letts with such Eugene O'Neill and his LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and Edward Albee and his WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. Letts certainly has the great sense of theatre that characterizes these writers and their plays, but in truth one might better describe him as the Jacqueline Susann of the theatrical world, with AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY something like a rural VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Alcohol, drugs, suicide, nasty divorce, ill-advised marriage, seduction, child molestation, incest, and racism are the fabric of his tale--tossed about with considerable profanity and some of the nastiest dark humor imaginable. "She smuggled Darvocet into the psych ward in her vagina," daughter Barbara says acidly of her drug-addicted mother Violet. "There's your Greatest Generation for you. She made this speech to us while she was clenching a bottle of pills in her cooch, for God's sake."
The play opens as Beverly Weston, a noted poet, retired professor, and practicing alcoholic interviews Johnna for the position of housekeeper, cook, and his wife Violet's keeper. Beverly is drunk, but not so drunk that he cannot give a mean lecture on the tendencies of Hart Crane, John Berryman, and T.S. Eliot in a stream of remarks that eventually become the intellectual key of the play--for Eliot, he has made a disastrous marriage and like Crane and Berryman he is preparing to commit suicide.
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