August: Osage County -- an Epic Production of a Flawed Family and a Failed Dream

 

This is the dead land / This is cactus land….T.S. Eliot

 

It is hot; the setting is dark.  Welcome to the maelstrom of the “Weston” family, Tracy Letts’ spellbinding play August: Osage County, among the best American plays ever written.  Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production is a riveting, gut-wrenching, fast-paced 3 plus hours with as much emotional impact as can be wrought on stage.  The disintegrating Weston family is a metaphor for American civilization itself.

 

The setting and the characters are very personal to the playwright, having grown up in Oklahoma, not far from Osage County.  Director William Hays perfectly renders Letts’ disturbing story, encouraging the actors to find their own sense of realism in delivering this unforgettable performance. 

 

Letts deals with big bold multi-layered themes even prophetic ones given what has transpired since the play was first staged in 2007.  Oklahoma was the destination of the infamous Trail of Tears, the result of Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal “policy.  Letts conflates this original American sin with the decline (and with his latest play, The Minutes, the destruction) of the American Dream. 

 

In a Prologue, we meet Beverly, a disillusioned, aging, one-published-volume poet, and the patriarch of the Weston family with its generational dysfunctional maladies of infidelity, alcoholism, and drug dependency.  He is interviewing a housekeeper, Johnna, a young Cheyenne woman.

 

Beverly alludes to poets T.S. Elliot and John Berryman.  Born in Oklahoma, Berryman suffered from alcoholism and depression.  In 1972 he committed suicide.  Not coincidentally, the worn Weston family home in the play is vintage 1972, although set in 2007.

 

He commends a T.S. Eliot work to Johnna, citing perplexing, disillusioned lines from the poet’s The Hollow Men beginning a framing device for the play, a portrait of the corrupted soul of the Weston family.  And so, the audience too, is drawn into their story.

 

Family Dinner at the Weston Home Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

This production features Sara Morsey in an impressive PBD debut as Violet Weston, Beverly’s bitter and manipulative pain pill addicted wife.  Her performance is electric, capable of rising from appearing nearly normal to being completely delusional, but even in her drug impaired state (or especially) she is capable of masterfully hurling the slings and arrows of invectives and recriminations, brandishing a sword of guilt, a textbook rageaholic.  It is her form of truth-telling.  She was carefully taught, admitting to her daughters during one calm moment in the play my mama was a nasty, mean old lady. I suppose that’s where I get it from.  

 

Beverly is inured to her, and counters with his long-time addiction: alcoholism. There are so many memorable scenes featuring Sara Morsey but her cathartic, abandoned and seductive dance to "Lay Down Sally," is a view into Violet’s primordial inner character and youth.  It is a role which rivals Mary Tyrone’s in Long Day’s Journey into Night.  Morsey’s explosive performance as Violet Weston rises to that level.

Ryffin Phoenix, Sara Morsey, Kathy McCafferty Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

Beverly Weston is played by Dennis Creaghan, a long-time PBD veteran, with a resigned miasma of defeat.  He has gone missing after hiring the Cheyenne housekeeper Johnna who is played by Ryffin Phoenix, her PBD debut, with a quiet dignity and steadfastness lacking in the other characters.  Beverly quotes Eliot to her, “Life is long”, and then leaves for his date with oblivion.

 

Beverly’s sudden, inexplicable disappearance brings together the three Weston daughters, all bearing family scars. 

 

Kathy McCafferty is the eldest daughter Barbara Fordham, the other leading role in the play.  McCafferty is no stranger to iconic PBD productions, having played Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire, Regina, in The Little Foxes, and Rosemary, in Outside Mullingar.  It is another McCafferty bravura performance tracing her character’s devolution from the “in charge” rival to her mother to the clear successor to her parents’ hopelessness, left with her father’s bottle of scotch, occupying her father’s desk chair reprising his interview with Johnna, and then a demoralized exit, not understanding her ineffectiveness.  It is yet another leading role which McCafferty makes her own with her astounding command of a wide range of emotions.

Kathy McCafferty, , Sara Morsey. Bruce Linser Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

She has brought her 14 year old daughter, Jean, deftly played by Allie Beltran, back to the family home.  Jean is struggling with her parents’ separation, as well as the normal angst of a teen thrown into a strange environment.  Barbara’s estranged husband, Bill, has come to support his soon to be ex-wife.  Bill, compassionately performed by Bruce Linser, is a university professor who is having an affair with one of his students.  

 

Margery Lowe, another long time acclaimed veteran of the Dramaworks stage is Ivy Weston, the fragile middle daughter, who carries the load of having spent years living near her childhood home and dysfunctional parents.  She is now carrying on a clandestine relationship with “Little Charles” (Iain Batchelor, his mainstage PBD debut) who she thinks is her cousin, and has a fantastical hope of moving to New York with him in the near future.  However this dream is as potentially stillborn as her two other sister’s expectations are for happiness in their own lives. 

 

The youngest daughter, Karen Weston, is gregariously performed by Niki Fridh, who is constantly trying to find validation.  She moved far away to Florida in an effort to ultimately find Mr. Right after a long string of Mr. Wrongs.  She brings home her fiancé, a thrice married, pot smoking, sleaze, Steve, played to perfection by Christopher Daftsios, another PBD newcomer.  All she can focus on is a long fantasized honeymoon in Belize.  

 

Further complicating the combustible plot, as secrets are exposed, is Violet’s overbearing sister, Mattie Fae Aiken, masterfully played by PBD veteran Laura Turnbull, a difficult role as she is mostly loathsome.  She arrives with her henpecked husband, Charlie, to provide the obligatory support to her sister, while displaying an atavistic viciousness towards her adult son "Little" Charles, more understandable as a dark secret is revealed at the end of the play. 

 

Her husband, Charlie, is skillfully performed by Stephen Trovillion, his PBD debut.  His acting chops are equal to his comic ones as he demonstrates when asked to say grace before the disastrous family dinner.  Although he (like the other men in the play) is ineffectual, in the end he and Bill have their stand-up-to-their-wives moments.  They are unfortunately both failed peacemakers.

 

That same dinner scene displays Iain Batchelor’s fine acting, struggling, as “Little” Charles, to rise above humiliation to make, unsuccessfully, an announcement concerning his love for much put-upon Ivy.  It is painful to watch although a skillful and affecting performance.  

 

As family scars and secrets are peeled away, and old worn dysfunctional roads are traveled, the play finally devolves into a hopeless whimper, completing the T.S. Eliot framing for the play.  The sole survivor, indeed the caretaker for this defeated family, is the noble Johnna, who we can see in the attic, calmly reading T.S. Eliot as the family erupts and disintegrates below.  In a pouch she wears her umbilical cord around her neck, a Cheyenne tradition of her soul having a destination when she dies.  And where do the Weston family souls go?  Or Western Civilization for that matter?

 

 It is not only the destruction of a single family but symbolically of “the dream,” the American Dream of success, happiness, the next generation being better off than the last, of equal opportunity. But Manifest Destiny was a corrupt foundation.

 

Kathy McCafferty ruminatively delivers Barbara’s monologue that encapsulates the play:  One of the last times I spoke with my father, we were talking about ... I don't know, the state of the world, something ... and he said, "You know, this country was always pretty much a whorehouse, but at least it used to have some promise. Now it’s just a shithole." And I think now maybe he was talking about something else, something more specific, something more personal to him ... this house? This family? His marriage? Himself? I don't know. But there was something sad in his voice--or no, not sad, he always sounded sad-something more hopeless than that. 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. This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go. Here today, gone tomorrow.--- Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm.  (Or as T.S. Eliot wrote “Not with a bang but with a whimper.”) 

 

Offsetting these heavy themes, Letts plants land mines of acerbic humor and F bombs galore; yes, some sudden laugh out loud moments, unusual in a great American tragedy.  No other drama can compare, although August has other similarities to the works by Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neil, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard (works of all have been produced at PBD).  Letts provides subtle hat tips to the great American playwrights, including the pivotal role of a safe deposit box, awakening memories of Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes. 

 

Multiple Scenes in the Weston Home Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

The production successfully stages those difficult scenes where multiple conversations are going on.  This is especially true of the post funeral family dinner where Violet of all people reprimands the group that this is a funeral dinner not a cock fight.  It is a prelude to a down and dirty family wrestle-mania match: disturbing and realistically staged.  Hayes had the assistance of David Hyland who not only admirably played the part of Sheriff Gilbeau, but served as Fight Choreographer as well. 

 

This may be Hayes’ directorial masterpiece, his passion for the play becoming part of the fabric, the staging so organic.  He has created Letts’ vision of a window into which, we, the audience, can view these sometimes oh so uncomfortable truths.  Some will relate more than others to these flawed characters.  All will leave the theater, somewhat stunned and emotionally drained and yet entertained.  He cast the play perfectly and led the actors to places rarely seen.

 

The technical crew of PBD has created the right ambiance for this epic play.  The scenic design is by Michael Amico who has designed scores of previous PBD productions.  The multiple locations of the moody, dark prairie house are on full display.  The windows are covered so there is no differentiation between night and day.  They live in the shadows as T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men.   

 

Lighting atmosphere by Kirk Bookman enhances the realism and keeps the audience focused.  There are exceptional lighting moments such as the one on Violet in her first drug induced appearance at the top of the stairs and the flickering TV light drawing in Charlie, Little Charlie, and Jean.

 

Resident Costume Designer Brian O’Keefe has created everyday clothing emphasizing the distinctive characters in the play.  Funeral attire is black, the women in dresses except for Ivy’s pants suit to which Violet cuttingly says You look like a magician’s assistant.  And O’Keefe’s costume does.  Violet's stunning funeral dress fits her to perfection. O’Keefe, can build any wardrobe piece single-handedly.

 

Roger Arnold’s sound design embeds microphones in the walls to capture actors speaking with their backs to us, and ones to carry the sounds of overlapping conversations.  It is a cacophony of family factions arguing at different points on the set as you can see Jean with her hands on her ears.  The western sounds of the harmonica fill the brief transitional scenes.

 

This is a high energy, passionate production of one of the great American plays.  The experience of seeing it on the intimate Palm Beach Dramaworks stage in West Palm Beach is extraordinary.  

 

 

Deconstructing Paul Newman

 

There is a growing place for sadness as we age.  The illnesses and the passing of family members, friends and acquaintances plumb its depth.  Perhaps one reason I’m drawn to the movies on TCM, even if I’ve seen them, is the actors are frozen in time.  There is a sense of comfort and familiarity.

 

I am not a star-struck person, although during my lifetime I’ve casually met some Hollywood luminaries, such as Yul Brenner who was my seat mate on an Eastern Airlines shuttle flight, and once we attended the Academy Awards as my company published their annual index to those awards. 

 

But my more substantial casual meeting was with Joanne Woodward when we published Westport, Connecticut: The Story of a New England Town's Rise to Prominence.  In addition to her being a prominent actress (and wife of Paul Newman), she was very active in the Westport Country Playhouse and the Westport Historical Society and wrote the Forward for the book.  We had a publication party and I spent part of an afternoon in May 2000 with her, and toured the Historical Society with her as a guide, chatting about their early years in Westport and the coincidence that we were once neighbors, both with homes along the Saugatuck River, separated by Weston Road.  (Ann used to collect for United Fund in our immediate neighborhood and was assigned the Newman property, being warmly received by Joanne’s mother who lived in an adjacent house.)

 

During our three decades in Westport / Weston we saw Paul Newman in various venues, mostly restaurants.  Ann once selected apples across a large bin with him at a local farm.  We never bothered him.  All we knew was the guy on the screen.  Once he drove into our office parking lot in his modified VW Beetle with a Porsche engine.  Unfortunately, one of the women who worked for us spotted him from our second-floor office window.  And waited, along with others in the office for his return, and when he did, Ruthie (as I recall her name harking back to 1975 or so),  ran out the door as he got into his car and said something to the effect “Oh, Mr. Newman, won’t you wave to the others standing at the windows?” I understand he actually got out of the car and with a forced grin, waved. 

 

 

When he died, I wrote the following in this space:  “The town treated him pretty much like anyone else and that is the way he wanted it. He was just there, around town, and of course larger than life on the screen, and because of his extensive charity work, even on bottles of salad dressing. He was such a part of the fabric of all of our lives. I feel a profound sense of loss whenever I think of him, or see him on the screen or on those bottles of “Newman’s Own” which he funded to last into perpetuity for the benefit of progressive causes. He was iconic and an iconoclast at the same time, a true maverick who lived his life the way he wanted, not the way Hollywood normally dictates.”

 

But the point of writing this present essay is that I just finished reading his memoir Paul Newman; The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man.  Also, I recently learned that Sotheby’s is set to auction “more than 300 individual items that the legendary actors assembled and enjoyed throughout their 50-year marriage.”  All of those items apparently come from their Connecticut home, the one Joanne and I talked about that afternoon.

 

Tragically, Joanne was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s sometime in 2007 and only a few days later Paul was diagnosed with terminal cancer; he died in 2008.  Since then Ethan Hawke’s “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part documentary about them was featured on HBO, and Newman’s memoir was published.  The Sotheby’s auction is the last step in deconstructing lives which heretofore have been an enigma.

 

Paul Newman agreed to be interviewed by his friend Stewart Stern for the memoir and a substantial amount of oral history was transcribed, but Newman did not publish it during his lifetime and destroyed some and when Stern passed in 2015 some duplicate notes came in possession of the Newman Woodward family. 

 

Their father wanted his children and grandchildren to understand his remoteness in his early years, his alcoholism, and to separate the man from the myth of a movie actor who had swagger and startling blue eyes.  That demeanor was overcompensation for feelings of inadequacy, as he always felt his acting skills were suspect in getting parts – that it was his good looks alone that counted for his early success..

 

In compiling the memoir, the editor David Rosenthal relied as much on friends, family, and colleagues as he does on the transcript of Newman’s recollections.  Nonetheless, the sense of the man comes through.  What I quote below are Newman’s own recollections.

 

He recognized (and to some degree lamented) that “Newman’s luck” contributed to his success, being born white, with those baby blues, and the fact that when James Dean died, he got more opportunities to play roles that would have gone to Dean.  He self-effacingly admits I never got the sense that anything I did on stage was spectacular or even something very exciting. It may have been workmanlike or OK, but was I really a highly highly knowledgeable actor?  I was a kid with an attractive exterior, had a tremendous amount of energy and a lot of personality.

 

Corroborating what Joanne told me about their early years, some of it was a struggle.  She didn’t go into specifics but Newman does.  He and Joanne met on the set of the Broadway production of Picnic and their affair began while Paul was still married to his first wife.  As he recalls, when I first got the job in Picnic, I had a wife and child (with another one on the way), and only $250 in the bank.  I don’t know how long I would have been able to stay afloat without some financial cushion or if the play didn’t have a long run. I had even applied for a job at the Hillside Avenue branch of the US post office in Queens. Ironically, at the time that was my own neighborhood post office.

 

Newman’s life and my own emotionally intersect in the behavior of our mothers, his nicknamed Tress and mine, Penny.   When his father was dying in a hospital he just needed to get Tress’ agreement to his estate plan, but she refused to sign anything; Tress kept yelling at him on his deathbed, accusing him and vilifying him. She wouldn’t let him fucking die!  Although not exactly the same, that was essentially my mother’s reaction as my father died.

 

Another similarity was that his mother turned on his wife, as mine did on my wife.  Tress was convinced that Joanne hated her and sought evidence.  Joanne would occasionally go out with Gore Vidal (who was gay) to the theatre as Newman’s and Woodward’s relationship was still clandestine.   At the opening of Ben Hur which Vidal co wrote, Tress noticed Gore and Joanne holding hands, chatting. Tress came to visit us in New York when I was on Broadway. We were driving one evening in my Volkswagen when suddenly my mother said to me “I know why your wife hates me! It’s because she’s having an affair with Gore Vidal.“ I slammed on the brakes and said “get out of the fucking car.” There were tears and apologies, but I still dropped her at the corner of 18th St., 5th Avenue.

 

My mother was quite a dame. She had an internal drummer, and that drummer was not affected by other reasons; there was a song going on with her and she stuck to it; if she thought something was going on in a certain way that’s the way it was it didn’t make any difference what actually happened; to her it wouldn’t change. And I didn’t speak to my mother again for 15 years. 

 

Was it all because of what she said about Joanne? No, not really; but it was such a relief to use that as an excuse to escape from her. She represented all my leaden baggage, the parts of myself that I didn’t like, that sense of subservience, uncertainty, not knowing where the next attack was coming from or what the reason for it might be.

 

We too hardly spoke to my own mother for ten years, for similar reasons, the only way to protect my family.  I know that feeling of relief as well.

 

Their marriage went through some rocky times, the drug overdose of his son, Scott, Newman’s own alcoholism and feeling like a fraud.  But at his side, mostly always was Joanne, and he (they) battled through it and I think that with his 1982 film, The Verdict, in which he plays an alcoholic attorney, he finally got in touch with Paul Newman, the real person and real actor and his films and stage work from there on came from a different place.  He also became a passionate and competent race car driver, and that swagger became more self-confidence.  Then there was the development of his philanthropy, most prominent, his food enterprises, the profit from which goes to worthy causes and The Hole in the Wall Gang.

 

But even in his charitable endeavors he is self-effacing.  I can afford to be charitable; I’m not going to be that really affected. Why will I suffer when I give away $10 million? That won’t change the way I live. I won’t eat less well. I can still stick a Buick engine in a Volvo.  I’ve had the luck of the draw, living in a democracy, being of the majority color, having an opportunity for education, enjoying the Bill of Rights, the four freedoms, and everything else.  The easiest thing I can do, frankly, is to give away money.

 

Yet he did it in a substantive way, more than most of his colleagues, and the endowment he created will live on.

 

We shared some of the same places and times and after all those years of living nearby the famous film legend, I too have finally gotten to know him. They were a unique couple but, in many ways, had ordinary lives and heartbreaks like the rest of us.

 

As the Woodward Newman Family state about the forthcoming auction, “Our parents have dedicated their lives to pursuing the things that inspired them, whether personally, professionally, or as collectors. We hope the public takes as much pleasure from this collection that our family has cherished for decades, which offers further insight into who they were beyond their glamorous Hollywood personas.”