August: Osage County

“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I’m not saying that there is no such a thing as love. It’s not love. But this thing in itself is not love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born, your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but’ they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium.”

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

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About August

The play August (original title: August: Osage County by the American playwright Tracy Letts, 2007) is a dark comedy and as earthy, vitriolic and funny as the play is, it is also heartbreaking because it shows so clearly how perverse human nature can be and how difficult, if not impossible, it is to change the deeper patterns of that nature by letting go of the past.

Exactly, this is a story of people who under the surface of family life, partially due to fear or panic or some twisted unrequited love, they must destroy themselves. The more they reveal about themselves to the others, the more they understand that they don’t know each other, that they are complete strangers.

The occasion of their reunion is the suicide of the family patriarch, Beverly, a bitter alcoholic poet. Arriving for the funeral and overnight layover that follows is a veritable menagerie of misery: family members and guests, each with a secret to hide, hosted and tortured by the Weston matriarch, Violet, domineering woman dying of throat cancer.

This is the setting: Mom totters on the stairs gobbling a rich variety of pills. In the dining room, a woman confesses her affair. In a Chekhovian-stylized despair, the three sisters are trapped in their lives and cannot escape from the shadow of their mother, nor entirely leave the house. A minor girl will be almost abused. Up in the attic, a Native American woman is reading TS Eliot’s Hollow Men. Yes, all these people are hollow men. Hollow men that fade and disappear just like the state of men in the modern society, this consumerism in which they actively participate; routine life cited by the ritual consumerism that creates monsters and parks on the parking lot resulting in despair and psychotics. This miserable family symbolizes the collapse of the American idealism i.e. the idealism in general.

Now, is dysfunctionality the new order of the consumer society? Or recreating of new interpersonal relations can be foreshadowed?

There are no easy answers or facile redemptions, only questions, flashes of insight due to which the drama never ceases.

Biljana Krajchevska, dramaturge