August: Osage County

DINE TO KNOW The Weston clan has a spot of indigestion.

Photograph: Joan Marcus

Running more than three hours, with a tri-generational cast dispersed throughout a three-tiered set spinning out at least a dozen story lines, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is the dysfunctional-family drama as a bulging scrapbook of misery, grudge-holding and poisoned heritage. Its three acts possess the heft and weave of lifetimes, but leavened by the author’s dark humor and fondness for pulpy, gothic flourishes. The result is a tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and its tougher people.

Although we’ll leave it to stage historians and scholars of tomorrow to pass judgment on A:OC’s status as a lasting work of art, there’s no gainsaying the blistering, galloping force of Letts’s vision and its superb realization by director Anna D. Shapiro and her fierce Steppenwolf cast. Set in motion by the disappearance of Weston-family patriarch-poet Beverly (Dennis Letts) from his weathered Oklahoma homestead, the story turns on the monumental meltdown of his wife, Violet (Deanna Dunagan). This sublimely toxic creation—a pill-popping harridan who gleefully lashes out at her three daughters, their husbands and her vanished spouse—inevitably calls to mind Albee’s Martha and O’Neill’s Mary. In portraying this desperate survivor, Letts never descends into self-pity or trite sympathy; instead, lacerating wit and gritty pessimism churn underneath the Westons’ black-comic power struggles and bouts of recrimination.

In a generally excellent 13-person cast, Amy Morton stands out as the violently resentful eldest daughter, watching herself morph into her parents. Jeff Parry is equally good as her menschy but estranged husband. And Dunagan is acidly spectacular as the bitch-junkie mother of all time, a woman whose milk of human kindness curdled years ago.

—David Cote