Evan read and liked dk®'s review of August: Osage County:

"I don't feel at all tentative about including Tracy Letts's August: Osage County as one of my favorite plays of all motherfucking time -- excusez mon français -- alongside Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, Brecht's Mother Courage, Chekhov's The ...more I don't feel at all tentative about including Tracy Letts's August: Osage County as one of my favorite plays of all motherfucking time -- excusez mon français -- alongside Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, Brecht's Mother Courage, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and Beckett's Happy Days. Yep, make no mistake... Letts is playing with the major dramaturgical bitches with his alternately scathing/brittle and pathetic/sad tale of family dysfunction run amok.

Yeah, I'm channeling some of your protestations: Hasn't the family dysfunction angle been done to death? So often we're handed a grab bag of trendy quirks and Psych 101 evaluations by a writer and we're supposed to be blown away by his/her razor-like insight. Consider the film American Beauty, for instance. Sure, the country fell hard for that caricature of suburban anomie, but it was mainly just a compilation of de rigueur neurotic tics and provocations bookended by Mena Suvari's tits and Kevin Spacey's gay kiss. To borrow from Madame Stein, there wasn't any there there. Just some plastic bag twirling in a wind storm... that's the bone we were thrown in the way of psychological depth. Otherwise, Mr. Mendes fed us our infidelities, our drug use, our latent homosexuality, our path to statutory rape with Hollywood gloss and vacuousness. The image was all there was.

What I am saying is that any story can be told thousands of times -- and told freshly each and every time. Not like in the 1980s -- remember this? -- when there were something like four body-swapping movies out at once. The concept was the film. Who needs writers? Or better yet, let's have Schwarzeneggar and DeVito be twins... the premise alone will have Peoria chuckling and elbowing each other's sweet spots even before the first reviews come in.

So, yeah, August: Osage County faces the daunting challenge of seeming deserving to be viewed/read in this vast septic tank of family dysfunction. (Cross reference: Little Miss Sunshine, The Squid and the Whale, and The Royal Tennenbaums. Wherein psychological damage becomes cloying and precious.)

This play (the one you should see as if your life depends on it) focuses on the Weston family and their adjuncts and auxiliaries. Beverly Weston, the permanently sloshed, Faulkneresque patriarch, disappears one day without a trace. This impetus reassembles the family at his ramshackle house in rural Oklahoma. The mother Violet, probably the most monstrous primary character (although the contest is competitive), is a viperous pill addict with mouth cancer. Here, her three daughters discuss her drug addiction:

IVY: Here's how she does it: she sees a doctor for back spasms and gets a prescription. Day or two later she goes back, says she lost her pills and he writes her another one. Then next week she pulls a muscle, more pills, then the dosage is wrong, more pills, over and over, until she makes one too many trips and he says I'm not prescribing anymore. And she pulls a sheaf of prescription receipts out of her purse and says, "I'll go to the AMA and have your ass in court for over-prescribing me." She genuinely threatens these men and they give in to her.

BARBARA: You knew this was going on again? ... Different tactic today, just at her wounded best, this wilting hothouse flower. Which made me look like Bette Davis. I tried to goad her into it, you know, "C'mon, Mom, give him your speech about the Greatest Generation. Tell him about the claw hammer." I was like that guy in the cartoon with the frog that only sings for him.

IVY: It wouldn't have done any good. Dr. Burke's part of the same generation.

BARBARA: "Greatest Generation," my ass. Are they really considering all the generations? Maybe there are some generations from the Iron Age that could compete. And what makes them so great anyway? Because they were poor and hated Nazis? Who doesn't fucking hate Nazis? You remember when we checked her into the psych ward, that stunt she pulled?

IVY: Which time?

KAREN: I wasn't there.

BARBARA: Big speech, she's getting clean, this sacrifice she's making for her family, and --

IVY: Right, she's let her family down but now she wants to prove she's a good family member --

BARBARA: She smuggled Darvocet into the psych ward... in her vagina. There's your Greatest Generation for you. She made this speech while she was clenching a bottle of pills in her cooch, for God's sake.

IVY: Did you just say "cooch"?

BARBARA: The phrase "Mom's pussy" seems a bit gauche.

Of course, I love when anybody tears into the illusion of the Greatest Generation, but that's beside the point.

I saw this play in NYC last fall. It was over three hours, and not for one minute did I wonder what time it was or when it would be over. I didn't stare at the old man's weird socks across the aisle (I did that during the intermission) or worry that I might have to pee. This is funny, caustic, and psychologically rich playwriting at its best. Fly your ass out to NYC before it closes. You have received your instructions...


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Evan read and liked dk®'s review of King Richard III:

"William Shakespeare has demanded an awful lot of me over the years. For example, he has expected me to believe that men can -- regularly and with relative ease -- pass for women (and vice versa) even though we all know from casually espying that 6'2"...more William Shakespeare has demanded an awful lot of me over the years. For example, he has expected me to believe that men can -- regularly and with relative ease -- pass for women (and vice versa) even though we all know from casually espying that 6'2" post-op tranny with the strong jawline at the Lord & Taylor's cosmetics counter that even the most diligent efforts of science have rarely yielded an entirely convincing result. And to those of you who were shocked by Jaye Davidson's phallus unveiling in The Crying Game, I have two pieces of advice for you: (1) Come in from the cornfields please, Maynard, and (2) you might want to recollect more critically some of the people you've dated over the past twenty or so years. You might be more sexually progessive than you ever imagined.

In addition to tranvestism, mistaken identities, ludicrous coincidences, and an odd supporting performance from a bear in A Winter's Tale, Shakespeare expects me to believe that a devoted wife can be easily seduced by her husband's hunchbacked murderer before the corpse has even been borne away. Literally, one minute she's bent over the casket, dabbing her tears, and the next she's checking out Richard III's buns and saying, "Shit, I'd like to break me off a piece o' that!" (Paraphrase.)

Really, the alleged charms and powers of seduction of Dick 3 that Shakespeare expects the viewer (or reader) to countenance in this play are a bit much, but I suppose none of this fodder would've been terribly out of place on a 1990s chair-throwing talk show ("Men Who Are Dogs and the Women Who Love Them"). In this scenario, perhaps, Lady Anne, the widow seduced by Richard III, is not all that different from the bobbing-and-weaving fourteen-year-old girl who's dating a fifty-year-old pedophile Klansman with no teeth and a penchant for female circumcision.

But we can't evade the facts: Divested of its poetical content, its drama and outrage, The Tragedy of King Dick 3 is pretty ridiculous. It's naggingly perplexing why, within the parameters set up by Shakespeare, no one is able to subdue this oily cripple with a Trump complex. I mean, he's always making these voluble asides, with his enemies in the room, about what devious plans he's hatched, but even beyond all that, the only signs and signals of his evilness omitted from the play are hooves and the playing of "Tubular Bells" every time he enters the room.

Suspension of disbelief is a difficult contortion of our intellects in this profoundly cynical age in which we live. Unless a work of art is coded with flashing lights and circus organs as absurd, we tend to expect some semblance of reality from our art -- which is why I was outraged quite a few years ago when I saw the "thriller" The Temp with Lara Flynn Boyle as a psychopathic office temp worker (I think she works with me now) who sabotages a cookie marketing campaign by putting broken glass in the cookies and who is "found out" by her employer because the family photo on her desk is the photo that came with the frame. I mean, c'mon, people! She's cunning enough to birth plots within schemes within machinations, but she somehow imagines that no one trolling the aisles at K-Mart will notice that her husband is a professional picture frame model. (And, besides, wouldn't he have a UPC code over his groin anyway?)

What is my point? My point is that, even given the sensationalistic plot and the libelous portrayal of Dick 3 (who wasn't really evil in real life), this play is the shit. Shakespeare, I will suspend my disbelief for you anyday. (Oh... but I just remembered those stupid over-the-counter death potions from the end of Romeo and Juliet. Now those were soooo late-era Melrose Place.)(less) "