It was rather like meeting someone tremendously suitable as a mate, clever, handsome, kind, erudite, funny, etc, and simply not being able to find him attractive. August: Osage County, performed by the famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was brilliantly acted in a wonderfully evocative set (a many-levelled 19th century American house of which the audience had a cross-section view as if it were an open-up dollshouse). Yet never once was I moved, it was all Brechtian alienation as far as I was concerned.
       A family of three daughters, and their respective husband and daughter, fiance and undeclared lover, reconvene at the family home in Oklahoma when the alcoholic patriarch goes missing. The mother is a pill-popping, hard-as-nails product of a frightful childhood, each daughter turns out to be and have her own disaster (as does the granddaughter), and inevitably the only well-balanced person in the household is a young native American Indian woman who nourishes them all, both literally and metaphorically. Inevitably, too, old grievances resurface, revelations emerge, hubris incurs nemesis.
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company are unbelievably fine-tuned in their ensemble acting, and there were also salient individual performances - Deanna Dunagan as the mother Violet, Amy Morton as the elder daughter, Mariann Mayberry as the daughter who is prepared to overlook her fiance's shortcomings as long as he acts like a fiance and takes her to Belize for their honeymoon. Why did it leave me cold, then, and make me wonder why so many of the National audience gave it a standing ovation?
       Perhaps one problem was that there have been so many plays about unhappy families. We have so often seen old grievances resurface etc, and anyway it wasn't really a matter of resurfacing or unburying here - all the strains and struggles were already on the surface from the start, which left little room for drama. And the revelations were hardly revelations - they could all have been anticipated. This was Ibsen rehashed, without Ibsen's power to shock - I just kept feeling, 'Oh God, 'ere we go again!' at each family row and each predictable discovery, while the mother's unremitting malice became tedious.
       Author Tracy Letts apparently intended to transcend the well-worn particular. Apparently he was making a statement on the state of America and the American family, and on American degeneration during the Bush administration. So he sententiously proclaimed in interviews, which was just as well because it was unclear how these intentions were put into practice. How, except for the odd statement about America, was the Statement with a capital S made? There was a lot of screaming, a lot of hysteria, some smashing of plates and glasses, but isn't Pinter's weasel under the cocktail cabinet more telling than a bull rampaging in the china cabinet?
Jane O'Grady