So, chuggin’ along from apple Dallas to orange Fort Worth with my Evan and his mother, the landscape cobwebby with power lines and church spires, we three found ourselves consumed the entire two hour trip by the nightmare-show we’d just sat witness to at the Winspear Opera House. It’d been Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play, “August: Osage County”, and yes, a nightmare-show indeed, and one of the absolute most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Black humor, thick and hard as chalk, riddled all throughout this thoroughly American tragedy, Letts took on the near-cliché of the depressed, Southern family dynamic and whittled out a story so stunning in its possibility and reality, the very notion of cliché becomes ridiculous.
Just stepping into the Winspear Opera House, a new shiny brooch on Dallas’s sash, is akin to stepping into a wealthy, mink-coated wonderland. With a chandelier overhead, fiber optic as though they’d suckered up and screwed in some alien-giant fireflies into the ceiling, and a whir of well-dressed and well-to-dos, the three story set house hung there on the stage like a bruise on this otherwise opulent body. And it suddenly strikes me, the darker humor to be grinned at an audience of the upper classes tuning in to be cultured by the self-destruction of the decidedly lower.
The play constantly reflects and folds in upon itself and outside realities with a delicacy that makes insights on T.S. Elliott, Native American traditions, and socially complex sexual orientations and taboos seem natural, flowing out as organically as if Antonin Artud’s dream of perfect theatre as spontaneous life (or some such impossibility :p) realized. For myself, the play grabbed my interest most keenly with its applicability to America as a whole, an idea that became particularly crisp the more I meditated upon Jauna, the Cheyenne housekeeper who’s hired on to “live” in the house at the very beginning of the play by the one-scene-only patriarch (though, as always, his ghost lingers onward to haunt us all). But Jauna took ahold of me because she too seemed to haunt the play after the father’s disappearance, her presence as unseen caretaker representing for me a peculiar commentary on how we as Americans may still see Native Americans as foreigners in their own country, our home. Then there’s also the odd connection, as Evan pointed out, that’s created between her and her relationship to this deranged white family and that of the fabled Native American caretaking of the bumbling Pilgrims. – raising all sorts of questions about the generalizations and stereotypes Letts may or may not have been drawing upon when he crafted Jauna’s very specifically Cheyenne Native American character, just in need of the work.
Of course, what’s also impressive about Letts’ is the way in which he managed to incorporate and highlight the multitude of people and their issues without including any other non-white characters – a perspective of diversity beyond simply race that I certainly appreciate due to the disturbingly rising rate at which we employ the words “diversity” and “ethnicity” or “race” as totally synonymous. He adds sexual diversity, personality diversity, parenting style diversity, child rebellion diversity – everything, and all with the peculiar and unique focus upon women in power.
Even now I continue to meditate upon this play; it has so absorbed me. I’d actually really love to write a paper about this play from some angle, but no class is being particularly accommodating at this point and I don’t have the time to tackle another recreational paper at this point – I guess professors prefer our research to pertain to their classes. … Come on, guys. Come on.
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