A domestic drama, set around the kitchen table, that includes a credit for fight choreography? Get excited – particularly given that in Pear Theatre’s intimate new black-box space, plates shatter and fists swing inches from the audience.
Sitting in the front row for “August: Osage County” provides the electrifying experience of joining the fray.
Written by a man, “August” is a play about bitterly aging women bent on self- and mutual destruction. A tender, disjunctive opening scene with the play’s vanishing patriarch left this first-time viewer unprepared for what would follow. As we watch the Weston family and its hangers-on pass a week in domestic crisis, the drama incorporates an equal number of male and female actors. Yet playwright Tracy Letts’ triumph is his single-minded spotlight on the ferocious, formidable women, including Betsy Kruse Craig (as Barbara) and Marjorie Hazeltine (Karen), who invest his characters with a life greater than any individual role.
The show is numerically sprawling, with three acts over three hours, but feels taut, roaring into every break with an intensity that leaves you in need of a breather. The final scene of director Jeanie Smith’s production opens where the play began, quite literally, and chillingly. Rising to leave, it felt less like an evening had passed and more as though we had been bystanders at the scene of an accident, now released to feel lucky in our own lives.
Diane Tasca, Pear Theatre’s founding artistic director, dazzled in a drab housecoat and slippers as Violet Weston, the aging matriarch who spends much of the play high as a kite. Tasca’s exploration of function under the influence – of pills, illness, trauma and neurosis – goes far beyond the text, with a haunting poetry of movement and tone. She and her flame-haired female relatives dominate every scene, and Letts provides words for them that are poignant and lonely in their selective lack of grace.
When the eldest adult daughter, Barbara, nurses a whiskey amidst familial wreckage, she reflects on her father’s mounting sadness and a sense of promise pulling back to reveal a ‘shithole.’
“As if it had already happened. As if whatever was disappearing had already disappeared. As if it was too late. As if it was already over. And no one saw it go,” she says and pauses bleakly. “Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.”
In a 2014 interview with The New York Times’ Alex Witchel, Letts said creating “August” was the thing of which he was most proud, amid his extensive acting and writing career – not just because it was the “true story” of his own family, but because he felt it embodied what he believes about ensemble work in the theater as a whole.
The Pear players deliver on this promise, creating an ensemble experience in which the cast of 13 feels tightly interwoven, each character sharply memorable yet collectively created. Roles that might skew toward caricature, such as Dan Kapler’s smarmy lecher, Steve, or Leslie Newport Wright’s broadly brassy Mattie Fae, instead feel grippingly wrought (perhaps a bit scaled up) from what we see in our own lives.
The play concludes this weekend, with performances scheduled 8 p.m. today (July 8) and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday at 1110 La Avenida St., Mountain View.
For tickets and more information, visit thepear.org.
