[NEohioPAL] "August: Osage County": Minority Opinion

[Robert Hawkes]

Well, not so much an opinion, perhaps, as an expression of taste, but a
thoughtful such expression, I hope, and food for further thought for such as
may care about the State of the Art.

*August: Osage County* is a well-written play, well produced and executed in
this touring production (except for a climactic physical moment in the
second act, which, on the night I saw it, seemed muddy and unpersuasive).
And Estelle Parsons is marvelous, etc etc - no argument on any of that.

One certainly has to admire a playwright with the guts to open the show with
jokes about and allusions to T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and John Berryman -
though on the night I saw it, these were greeted with deathly quiet. I
suppose one runs a risk alluding at all in the present cultural climate. The
reference to *Night of the Hunter* later in the play seemed to lay a similar
egg.

Despite my admiration for the writing generally, though, I must admit to
being put off by humor which is so largely generated by ultimately
gratuitous cussing and name-calling, not to mention the "let's say rude
words and giggle" passage amongst the three sisters.

And what puzzles me most is our abiding appetite for drama of family
nastiness and Revelation of the Skeleton. Didn't that reach its zenith
nearly 50 years ago with *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* ? (Well, maybe a
bit later with *Buried Child*.) Hasn't it all been done to death? Nobody who
has endured "Dr Phil" for so short a purgatory as a week is going to be
shocked or surprised by any skeleton in my play. So my play had darn well
better be about something bigger as well, I think. Even the news that my
father is my brother is as old as the Greeks, but Sophocles had larger fish
than "shock" to fry, by a long chalk. (Besides, his audience already knew
the story. For them, The Reveal was not The Deal.) And in this play, the
daughter's speech about her father's remarks about America, and the overt
hint that he was really talking about the family (and thus that the family
somehow represents America?),...well, it seems pretty limp by the time we
get to it in the third act.

Just a matter of taste, perhaps, and so not really discussable, but I'm a
good deal more amused and engaged by a narrative experiment such as *
Ouroboros*, or by a really tragic meditation such as *Thom Pain (based on
nothing)* than by the tale of all this individual woe which ends up seeming
so restricted, sort of like soap opera or the local news - though in this
case with a quality of writing which *almost* redeems it.
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