If you smell smoke near Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston near Main and Holman, don’t be alarmed. It’s only Dirt Dogs Theatre’s production of Tracy Lett’s August: Osage County, burning up the boards and blistering the paint. The combustion is phenomenal.
The blaze is primarily caused by Deborah Hope’s gloriously acidic performance as mother-from-hell Vivian Weston, who screams “tell the truth” no matter who will be destroyed by her invective. She’ll eat you alive if you falter for a moment in her gimlet gaze. She’s Medusa, Lady Macbeth, and all mythic mothers who eat their children when they misbehave. Get out of her way when she’s popping pills to relieve the pain from mouth cancer. The disease doesn’t stop her from assaulting any of her family who annoy her. “Nobody slips anything by me,” she purrs contentedly after revealing a horrible family secret that knifes through her daughter. She’s the ultimate survivor, and it doesn’t matter who stands in her way.
Hazy, boozy, or even momentarily clear-headed, Vivian is the star of this show, the absolute head of the family, the blazing white heat of a dying dynasty. Don’t cross her or she’ll slash you with a thousand cuts from her foul mouth. Hope is magnificent in this role of roles, clomping down the stairs in a drug-induced blur, tearing apart her daughters and relatives like a sadistic medieval torturer, or holding court at the dinner table like the most despotic tsar. No one stands a chance against her wicked, laser-focused juggernaut. Hope shines like a super nova. She’s never been better. She commands attention. And gets it.
Now in its eighth year, Dirt Dogs Theatre Co. may have its finest production ever in August, even after such sterling shows as Clybourne Park, The Revolutionists, Glenngary Glen Ross, Talk Radio, White Guy on the Bus and The Eight: Reindeer Monologues. Letts’ 2008 Pulitzer and Tony-winning best play is in a class by itself.
An acclaimed playwright (Bug, Killer Joe, Superior Donuts) and actor (Tony-award winner for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff), Letts knows exactly how to write for actors, and when to give them their moment in the spotlight. August sports a large cast, but everyone gets a moment to shine, either with a monologue or a confrontational scene between two. Letts’ technique is structurally flawless; characters melt down, then the lights go up somewhere else in the set and we’re ready for more meltdown. The energy is constant, flowing, always building. Director Ron Jones knows all the ebbs and flows of Lett’s raging river of a drama, and keeps this three-hour production (two intermissions) moving swiftly through the rapids. Thanks to Lett’s theatrical facility and Jones’ deep-dish understanding, the play moves inexorably to its foregone conclusion.
An epic family drama, August conjures classic theater’s dysfunctional tales from the Garden of Eden, the House of Atreus, those royal Danes at Elsinore, Chekhov’s three sisters, the Tyrones from Long Day’s Journey into Night, the Hubbards from The Little Foxes, even the Lomans from Death of a Salesman. All are here, distilled, decocted, boiled down into the modern messed-up American family, a gothic comic horror show of distant dad, gorgon mom, and the poison parents infect onto their offspring. Everyone is damaged goods, and good luck if you can escape the claustrophobia, suffocation, and psychic destruction.
Beverly Weston (John Raley) is a failed poet, a lover of words and a greater lover of booze. He hires Johnna, a Cheyenne (a grounded and appealing Elissa Cuellar), as housekeeper and overseer of his drug-addled wife Violet (Deborah Hope). After this first scene, Beverly disappears, and his apparent suicide motivates his family to come together for the rest of the play.
The Weston house in Pawhuska, Oklahoma (located in Osage County, during August), is hermetically sealed. The windows have been covered with paper and taped over – matriarch Vivian won’t turn on the air conditioning – and you can’t tell day from night. It’s a house rotting from the inside. With its ancient secrets and constant pain, Mark Lewis’ three-tiered set, from living room with pull-out sofa and feathered table lamp, to the second floor landing and then up to the housekeeper’s garret room with its chenille bedspread, is solid and functional. Each level, usually with its own special scene, is wondrously lit by Jim Elliot’s atmospheric lighting.
The large cast is exemplary. If anyone can match Deborah Hope’s malevolent Violet, it has to be Elizabeth Marshall Black as eldest daughter Barbara, who morphs into her mother without knowing it. She blazes, matching her mother’s ferociousness and forked tongue. Husband Bill (solid Jeff Featherstone) has taken a much younger lover and will not return to their bed. When old flame Sheriff Deon (Brad Goertz) arrives to confirm Beverly’s death, Barbara may have a second chance.
Their pot-smoking, 14-year-old hippy daughter Jean (a spirited Elena Vazquez), is pawed by pedophile Steve (Bill Giffen), the fiancé of Violet’s youngest daughter Karen (Katrina Ellsworth), a real housewife of Miami. Middle daughter Ivy (Melissa J. Marek) is hot and heavy with her cousin (?) Little Charles (Justin Morgan Brown), the goofy son of Violet’s sister Mattie Fae (the beguiling and dramatic Elizabeth Byrd Shipsey) and her husband Charlie (poor downtrodden Brian Broome). All this angst is overseen by Cheyenne housekeeper Johnna, who will be the succor to Violet at the end when all her family deserts her and she is left alone in that hot house. As Johnna repeats T.S. Elliot’s “This is the way the world ends,” Violet repeatedly mumbles, “And then you’re gone.”
August: Osage County is a crazy quilt of recrimination, remembrance, and retribution, an old-fashioned revenge play that showcases actors doing what they do best. Dirt Dogs does this as well as anyone, perhaps better. It’s well worth your time.
August: Osage County continues through June 10 at 8 p.m Fridays and Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Monday, May 29, and Thursdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays at MATCH at 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit dirtdogstheatre.opg. $30.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
