August: Osage County

August: Osage County is the brutal, funny, debilitatingly-good play by Tracy Letts currently on Broadway, as performed by the Steppenwolf Theater Company. The play recently won the Pulitzer-Prize, and decidedly deserves it. It's about the secrets we bury inside secrets, about the lies we tell and the ones we accept. The cast is flawless, and filled with meaty, complicated, real roles for lots of women, something you don't see much of, it seems. The actors are like Olympians here, at the top of their game, bringing the most ridiculously skilled craft to the stage. Needless to say, perhaps, but I loved it.

It's a play that gets people excited. The audience reacts like they're at a cockfight, not watching a family drama about consequences that reverberate through generations. I think some of this audience rowdiness has to do with the fact that the people on stage are telling the truth to each other, which is something very few people ever do in life, let alone within their family structure. (Never mind that for the last eight years we've had a government that does not tell us the truth, and a media that does not tell us the truth.) Thus, the play actually performs a deep, real catharsis. In Who's Afriad of Virginia Woolf?, another play in which the actors tell each other the blistering, fundamental truth, you are left, in the end, with the unbearable amount of love and devotion that the George and Martha have for each other. In Osage County, however, whether or not anyone cares for anyone in such a deep human way is suspect, if not impossible. There are no happy endings. There is no redemption.

As entertaining as the actor's phenomenal performances, was the equally brutal performance by the young woman sitting behind me, who, during each of the two intermissions, spoke loudly--quite loudly--to her companion about The Theater. By this, I mean, the business of Broadway. She held an internship somewhere and was considering moving to an internship at Bravo or Cosmo or 'something like that.' She said she didn't want to start out working at The New Yorker because she was still 'young and fresh.' I wondered if getting an internship at these places was as easy as considering taking one, or if everyone at The New Yorker is old and dried-up. She said she was glad to be 'still young enough to wear a Betsey Johnson dress.' "I mean, what am I going to do at 45?" she said, "Go around in a Betsey Johnson dress?"

Everything that came out of her mouth was colored with a youthful inflation, and at the same time, an apathetic resentment of her apparently unchangeable future. She spoke of the importance of internships and the connections and relationships that you make there. "My friend Andrew started out as an intern at ABC and now he's a casting director," she continued without a breath, "so it's all about who you know and who you form these lasting connections with, I mean, once an intern and now he's an assistant to one of the office managers in the casting department." Okay, so, the truth is in the little details. "I'm young, I might as well do this while I can." The unsaid vision of her future was heartbreaking.

She talked about various shows opening to bad reviews or good ones, about which shows were doing well and which were destined to close the day after the upcoming Tony Awards, should they not win anything to keep them afloat. She spoke in the emphatic, dreadful voice of a person who's brainless enough to criticize the Broadway machine, very loudly, during the intermission of a Broadway show. Like the people bitching about editors and publishing houses while riding the F Train in the mornings: The thing about New York is, you never know who is sitting next to you. So shut the fuck up.

I feel lucky to have seen some truly life-altering theater--Cherry Jones' performance in Doubt, Harvey Fierstein's performance in Hairspray, Jennifer Miller in a purple dress show after show after show, for no money, with a bad ankle--but you rarely see such real theater. August: Osage County is the kind of theater that is elevated to the point of art, but rooted somewhere in the lives of regular people. The play was not just happening on stage tonight--loss, regret, anger, bullshit, fantasy--it was, in fact, spilling out of the mouth of the sad, brittle, empty woman behind me.