August: Osage County
Where to buy August: Osage County books online?
- ISBN13: 9781559363303
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
“A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people.”—Time Out New York
“Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is what O’Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama’s mid-century heyday while still making something entirely original.”—New York magazine
One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family tree at its finest—and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family tree reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and rowdily revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. After its sold-out Chicago premiere, the play has electrified audiences in New York since its opening in November 2007.
Tracy Letts is the leader of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
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A very disappointing book, only because it is written as dialogue for a stage performance, rather than in a novel form. Regretable only because the play was, according to people who saw it, a magnificent and powerful production.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This play does not live up to the hype. There is nothing new about the play and it appears critics and audience rave about it because it’s familiar. With all the twists, turns and family tree secrets, Mr. Letts has written a soap opera which would fit right in on TV. His finger prints are establish on every page. Things take place because the playwright wants them to take place. In a excellent play, things grow naturally out of the action I establish the characters shallow and uninteresting. The Native American caretaker is small more than a obvious symbol. Hasn’t the time of the poor person of color coming to the aid of white folks come and gone? Sorry, but quoting T.S. Elliot exposes a shallow play. Once the New York production closes, the play will be done in some regional theaters and a few non-professional theaters; then it will fade away. August: Osage County (what a pretentious title) is not a modern American classic. Better plays are: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Death of a Salesmen. They are American classics. As for superior contemporary plays, read: Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, Fifth of July, any play by August Wilson, Anna in the Tropics, Two Sisters and a Piano, Angels in America, and Topdog/Underdog, to name just a few. These are the plays that will be read and staged long after AOC is long forgotten.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
“Killer Joe”: now there was a play. Lights go down in the theatre. Suddenly a single light shoots across the stage. We see the rear end of a gal bending over as she searches into the refrigerator, its light illuminating her nude body. Bingo. And it goes straight up from there. Wonderful show. Audience loved it. “Osage” opens with a middle aged bugger talking inaudibly to an Indian woman about coming in as a maid. It’s a ten minute scene, more or else. Lights out and in the next we learn that he’s gone off and may be dead. People gather, drunks walk around on all fours. It’s something like an episode of the Coneheads lacking the cones. I heard a few laughs in the auditorium, but by then everyone had heard that the play was fantastic, so I guess they told their friends it was worth seeing. I didn’t. This is another one of these epic plays celebrated for about 14 1/2 minutes and sure to be forgotten. In fact, I defy persons who loved it to remember the names of the characters. We don’t easily forget Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” ditto Huge Daddy in “Cat On Hot Tin Roof.” The reason is the writing. In “August” there isn’t a single character worth remembering. Twenty years hence, it is inconceivable to me that an actress or actor would say that this is the play they’d most like to be in. Actresses keep reviving “The Small Foxes” because it has a fantastic role for a woman of a certain age. This is what keeps plays alive. These epic messes that keep building it to Broadway from the mid-west via Louisville and Chicago have lots of eccentric prairie dog types with goofy names and odd habits such as smoking pot at the supper table, but in the end this sort of late-Sam Shepard play goes nowhere. There is no dramatic action. There is nothing going on but a staged fleeting tale.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
As far as I am concerned, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY is a perfect example of the present state of American theater: it is trying too hard to be like the sit-coms and soaps on TV and screwball comedies in the movies. There was a time when theater would have something profound to say in an artistic manner, such as O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Williams’ THE GLASS MENAGERIE and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN and THE CRUCIBLE, Brecht’s THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHUAN and MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, etc. Nowadays we are seeing light-weight plays, such as DRIVING MISS DAISY, THE HEIDI CHRONICLES, EASTERN STANDARD, etc. I’m not surprised AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY won the Pulitzer Prize–so did DRIVING MISS DAISY, and that’s not adage much. It is surprising that the Pulitzer Prize once went to a monumental achievement like DEATH OF A SALESMAN and now it’s going to something like AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. Not only has the greed of capitalism ruined Wall Street, but it has also ruined Broadway. When Broadway stops caring about huge profits, then the American theater may regain its excellence. And people like me will start going back to the theater. (Don’t get me ongoing on Broadway musicals that are remakes of movies.)
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
What a disappointing play this was. For all the passion and screaming, additional than the father who dies in the first scene, you will not care at all about any of the characters in this play.
Consider what holds you, in the fantastic plays about angst, from O’Neill’s to Albee, Clifford Odets, Hellman, Osborne and Ibsen — even Strindberg and Beckett — you somehow care about at least one person in the play, or learn something about how they finished up as they did, or learn something from how they attempt to cope with their situation. You get none of that in this pointless screamfest. None of the young victims of the twisted adults are at all edifying. None of the adults have even the slightest enriching qualities of life or language to lift them up as characters or people. It is all just predictability. Most simpering of all are the disguised characterizations of what must be the leader-as-victim. Remember how you somehow felt renewed at the end of Long Day’s Journey or of Who’s Worried of Virginia Wolf? or of Awake and Sing or Hamlet? Well, you won’t have that feeling when this thing is over. You will just be glad it IS over.
It is because there are no lessons in this play for anyone.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5