Before you get distracted from reading this review – SEE THIS PLAY! Or else! The ‘or else’ being that you will miss out on a tour de force (I’ve always wanted to have a reason to use that phrase).

Tracey Letts’ play deserves all the hype and its many overseas awards. It is done full and exquisite justice by Susan Wilson and her supreme cast. This play puts its actors through the emotional wringer, and the audience with them. The opening night standing ovation was fully deserved.

This family based epic happens over just a few weeks but we learn so much about their back story and what drives them, and why they are all so terribly damaged, during the course of the play.

The play is very long and the first and biggest chunk is a test of concentration. But with a huge cast of characters, it is on reflection necessary so we know where they all fit in as they enter the story. The second two shorter acts are electrifying at times, to the point where I found myself not daring to breathe.

This is especially so in the scenes where the mother Violet (Jennifer Ludlam in breathtaking form as this wrecked, manipulative woman), is challenged by her eldest daughter Barbara (a jaw-dropping pitch perfect performance by Michele Amas). Tina Regtien makes us worry deeply for her character, the fragile Ivy, with Laura Hill giving a wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of the lonely youngest sister Karen.

As Violet’s sister Mattie Fay, Jane Waddell perfectly balances this character’s humour and bitterness. Anya Tate-Manning has few words as the American Indian housekeeper, Johnna, but is totally compelling as the family implodes. Lauren Gibson captures the desperation of Barbara’s daughter, Jean, who tries to escape from her misery by smoking pot. When Karen’s sleazy fiancé (Christopher Brougham is genuinely scary as Steve) comes onto Jean, your stomach knots up. When Mattie Fay bullies her socially inept son Little Charles (Jason Whyte), you want to reach out and hug him.

Ray Henwood opens the play as the drunken and cynical patriarch, Beverly. Charles senior and Barbara’s husband Bill (strong performances from Jeffrey Thomas and Jonathon Hendry), and the Sheriff (Richard Chapman), complete this large cast.

Complementing the finely crafted script and engrossing performances are John Hodgkin’s multi-level set, at once beautiful and practical, lit exquisitely by Marcus McShane, with Gareth Farr adding to the menace with his music. Gillie Coxhill’s designs for this large cast were right on the money.

This is a wildly ambitious production for any New Zealand theatre and will be remembered as one of Circa’s best. 
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It is not often that a Circa Theatre production receives a standing ovation on opening night but that was the case on Saturday with Susan Wilson’s production of award winning American playwright Tracy Letts play August: Osage County. And deservedly so. 

Such is the scale and dimension of this family saga, with has a feel of yesteryear about it akin to the plays of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, that it requires a large multifunctional set with a larger than life full-on production and performances to make it work. Fortunately Wilson and her large cast (when was the last time we saw 13 actors on stage in a professional production in Wellington?) rise to the occasion and meet the challenge head on ,creating an evening of powerfully dynamic and riveting theatre.

The play is not a happy one, every conceivable emotion, in particular those associated with angst and depression are rung out and squeezed dry but in doing so we see some amazing performances, especially from the women in the cast. 

Alcoholic patriarch Beverly (Ray Henwood) hires Johnna (Anya Tate-Manning) as a live-in home help for him and his pill popping wife Violet (Jennifer Ludlam) who also has cancer of the mouth. Within a week Beverly is missing so daughters Barbara (Michelle Amas), Ivy (Tina Regtien) and Karen (Laura Hill), and sister-in-law Mattie Fay (Jane Waddell), arrive with their spouses and children in tow to console Violet and help find him. 

[Spoiler alert] Beverley of course never returns, he is found drowned in the lake. Then as often happens with dysfunctional, disparate families, the aftermath of the funeral [ends] becomes a cauldron of anger and hatred as many skeletons emerge from the cupboard and the family is made to face long hidden home truths.

Much of this is caused by Violet’s canny knack of knowing what is going on even though she appears totally spaced out. While many of the family scenario’s played out are more likely to be seen in a soap opera like Days Of Our Lives than in real life they nevertheless provide great fodder for actors to get their teeth into which the cast do with great alacrity. 

Jennifer Ludlam reprises the role of Violet she was highly praised for in Auckland last year and it’s easy to see why. She is totally convincing as a women racked with pain, both physical and mental, yet with an acerbic tongue that she uses to lash out at everyone, family and visitor, without ever hesitating to cut down anyone in her way. 

Jane Waddell as her sister Mattie Fay gives one of her finest performances in a long and illustrious career on stage in Wellington as does Michelle Amas in her role as the eldest daughter Barbara. Totally convincing in the emotional roller coaster each goes through, they have lines of dialogue that actors would die for on stage and which they play to the hilt with power and energy. 

All the other actors in supporting roles give excellent performances in this mammoth production that is an epic of Hollywood proportions making this an excellent ensemble production that has to be seen.
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It is fascinating be in a theatre foyer alive with the smiling, excited faces of an audience who have just witnessed – over three-and-a-half hours (including 2 intervals) – the inexorable decimation of the Weston family.

First there is the elation that comes with seeing an excellent play superbly produced with a large cast of actors who unerringly claim their wonderfully crafted roles. But they have just enacted the hideously credible train wreck of a hastily convened family reunion. And we have laughed an awful lot at the spectacle.

Is it that we gain a perverse joy from watching the disintegration of ‘Weston civilisation’? Maybe – its huge success in the USA (whence it comes) not withstanding – there a special pleasure for Kiwis in thinking this is ‘them’ not ‘us’; the US not NZ. More likely, I suspect, we are delighted to have seen the universal elements of family dynamics exposed, because it either tells us we’re not alone in our suffering or it reassures us that, for all their faults, our families are not that bad.

Having seen the Auckland Theatre Company production and now this Circa incarnation, I don’t think playwright Tracy Letts set out to write an allegory in every detail. He just made choices in naming, placing and inter-connections that allow the specifics of this family fireball to resonate well beyond itself.  My assessment now is that he is not addressing the decline of the entire western world, just that of the value systems that saw the Western Plains conquered, settled and occupied through physical and emotion abuse.

The Plains – in Pawhukska, Osage County, Oklahoma – where the large and largely abandoned country home stands (its windows blacked out so day and night can no longer be distinguished) were taken from the Cheyenne Indians centuries ago. And the action of the play takes place in the sweltering heat of August: the high before the fall; the storm before a devastated calm.

In one of would-be matriarch Violet’s more violent outbursts she reveals her husband Beverly had an extremely deprived childhood and her sister Mattie Fay – whose married name is now Aiken (say it aloud) – was even more viciously abused as a girl than she was. No wonder he was emotionally absent as a father and the sisters’ default mechanism as mothers has been to undermine the self-esteem of their children the minute they fail to live up to their ill-conceived expectations (thus ensuring the spiral continues downward).

Reprising the role that won her great acclaim in the ATC production, Jennifer Ludlam’s volatile Violet – addicted to pills, thanks to the mouth cancer she is battling – is in turns semi-coherent, savagely ‘truthful’, abusively domineering, ruthlessly manipulative and pathetically vulnerable. It is all-the-more stunning for being played in the relative intimacy of Circa.

As a young adult, Beverly’s star rose briefly as a poet but 40-plus years, three daughters and a granddaughter later, it’s whisky that makes him loquacious. In the opening scene, in the process of employing a native American housekeeper to restore some semblance of order to the desultory shambles of their lives, Ray Henwood brings a desiccated wit to his T S Eliot-laden commentary on their status quo.

As Johnna Monevata (her father was called Youngbird but she has reclaimed the Cheyenne family name), Anya Tate-Manning is a quietly self-possessed and enigmatic presence. Stating simply that her parents have “passed”, she has no other home and she needs the job, the undemonstrative integrity, compassion and humanity Johnna brings to a place that has lacked such values for generations leaves her with a standing the incumbents wilfully lose.

It takes the disappearance of Beverly to bring the remaining Weston family and their current attachments back together under the same roof.

Tina Regtien is full of surprises as Ivy, the only daughter who has been unable to escape the Western Plains, but who has a secret that includes going East. Played as 45-going-on-18, she vacillates dynamically from repressed to fully expressed.

The role of Barbara, the eldest daughter, is second only to Violet in its epic emotional range. Her sharp tongue laced with her father’s dry wit makes “Barb” a very apt name. Thinking she has made the break – to academic and married life in Boulder, Colorado – the avalanche that brings her crashing down has already started, before she returns, with her husband’s infidelity. That combined with her stoner daughter’s teenage hormones, the recurring nightmare of her mother’s drug addiction and now her father’s disappearance make this the most challenging phase of her life, and Michele Amas meets the challenge brilliantly.

Her psychology professor husband, Bill Fordham, seems to be ‘tough love’ personified until you consider his clichéd leaving home for a young student, his indulgence of his daughter’s dope-smoking and his insidious habit of countering Barb’s attempts to express her hurt with psycho-babbled accusations. Jonathon Hendry’s ultra-plausible rendition demands we engage our brains to get the true measure of Bill.

Lauren Gibson’s pot-smoking vegetarian daughter – Jean Fordham, 14-going-on-24 – succeeds in challenging our idealistic concepts of liberty as she finds her own solutions to teenage and family stress.

The youngest Weston daughter, played with a super-sincere ‘prom queen’ brightness by Laura Hill, is Karen. She lives in Florida now and has become imbued with a live-in-the-moment love-everyone enlightenment, reserving her special love for her new fiancée Steve Heidebrecht, who works in ‘security’. Made manifest by Christopher Brougham, Steve is soon revealed as prejudiced and dangerous beneath the slick charm. Not everything is better out East.  

Violet’s sister Mattie Fay has stayed on the Plains, having married upholsterer Charlie and had a son, still called Little Charlie even though he’s 47. Jane Waddell so truly epitomises the knee-jerk cruelty that those abused as children can visit on their own children, that her Mattie Fay excites both horror and compassion. And – as with skewerings of truth by all the cast – laughs.

Jeffrey Thomas’s Charlie moves very dramatically from sport-watching beer-drinker though send-up artist to powerful defender of Little Charlie. Jason Whyte’s emotionally damaged son is such a fuck-up, so lacking in self-esteem, that the song he sings to his secret love is a revelation.

Representing the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence and corruption is the local Sheriff Deon Gilbeau, who was Barb’s high school prom date many years ago. Appearing to have solid and dependable core values in place of higher learning, wit and a volatile personality, Richard Chapman acquits himself well in the role.  

Ensemble-wise the cast’s interactions are impeccable. Especially memorable, amid a plethora of impactful moments, are the scenes involving the three Weston sisters.

Along with the unpredictability of Violet’s behaviour, and our responses to it, Letts has a signature device of starting scenes in mid-conversation so that we are immediately hooked into ‘catching up’. The pacing, rhythms and emotional dynamics are superbly scored by director Susan Wilson and Gareth Farr’s original compositions richly augment and link the action.

John Hodgkins has created a three level set that serves the play’s needs well and Marcus McShane’s lighting design, operated by Deb McGuire, enhances the action without drawing attention to itself.  

Many essays will be written by scholars attempting to work out exactly why this powerful portrait of a family simultaneously imploding and exploding is such a phenomenal success wherever it is staged (has there been a dud production yet)?

T S Eliot gets the last word, by implication, but I won’t spell out why. Suffice to say the play ends not with a bang but a whimper. And on opening night this compelled the audience to deliver a standing ovation. At first interval many thought, hell, two more acts of this? The second interval brought the same frustrations as a commercial break in a deeply compelling film. And by the end I don’t think I’m the only one who wanted to see the next episode.

The sequel could well be a two-hander, co-written by Tracy Letts and a Cheyenne playwright. Or maybe it’s up to us to imagine how that would play out and consider our own role in such a scenario. Meanwhile, book early to avoid the disappointment of missing a mesmerising ‘train wreck’ of epic and comic proportions.
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