[NEohioPAL] August: Osage Country Review

[Joe Fath]

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY
By Tracy Letts
LytHouse, LLC Production
10, 11, 12 2018 @ 7pm
225 High St. Fairport Harbor, Ohio 44077
Reserve tickets: lythouse2018 at gmail.com

Review by Paul Goehrke

It might be said that, unlike families, every great theatrical production
is great in its own way, but the lacking ones are all alike. Nothing of
what this production lacks -- curtains, hairline mics, age-specific
casting, and even (technically) a theater -- detracts from the greatness on
stage. Why not? Because the cardinal sin common to all "bad theater," that
unredeemable lack, is a deficit of truth, and this production has truth in
abundance.

It proves as true that a group of individuals can come together to conjure
a world somewhere "between the idea and the reality." There in the shadow
of the shuttered, hollow Lyric Theater, and with an eye toward its
resurrection
<https://www.lec.edu/alumnus-joe-fath-11-brings-community-theatre-to-campaign-for-lyric-theater>,
Director Joe Fath and cast create a pocket kingdom in the Diamond Dream
Gallery on High Street where actors marry hope and pain and memory in a
crucible of amateur devotion. Led by a foursome of women, as the play's
matriarch and three daughters, this ensemble pours out playwright Letts'
molten stream of words into a three-hour shot glass of throat-searing,
gut-punching, eye-watering Pawhuska moonshine. There are plenty of punch
lines, too.

Yes, there's something uniquely great happening in Fairport Harbor this
weekend. The reasons to see this inaugural production of AUGUST: OSAGE
COUNTY are many, primary among them being how that glaring abundance of
life offered by this ensemble pursues you after the final scene: out to the
lobby, back to your car, into your own home, until you recognize, in fact,
you've carried it inside yourself -- the still, hot truth of those Plains
-- and having met the bellows, it lingers on well beyond the ovation as a
burning, fading joy.

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