Making great theater is easy. Just get a Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning script, 13 excellent actors and a fabulous director.
Just kidding. There's nothing easy about it, but it does happen, and it's happening now. Cadence Theatre's production of "August: Osage County" is stunningly realized, an experience of outrageous comedy and visceral pain.
Written for Steppenwolf Theatre by its company member Tracy Letts, this 2007 play exploded in Chicago and was instantly imported to Broadway. A study of a searingly vicious and woundingly funny family in Oklahoma, it is Cadence's contribution to the Acts of Faith Festival. Three acts and three hours long, it flies by as Oklahoma's Weston clan gathers following the disappearance of its patriarch.
Before he goes, Beverly (played by John Hagadorn), a poet and university teacher, explains to Johnna (Carolyn Meade), the Cherokee woman he's hiring as a caretaker, "My wife takes pills, and I drink." Wife Violet (Melanie Richards) takes pills, all right, almost by the handful. She has cancer, and pain, but she's a doctor-shopper who manages to acquire quite a lot more painkillers and mood alterers than strictly necessary.
In Beverly's absence the family shows up: Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Jody Smith Strickler) with her husband Charlie (Gordon Bass) and son Little Charles (Steve Perigard); older daughter Barbara (Melissa Johnston Price) with her husband Bill (David Bridgewater) and teenage daughter Jean (Karen Stanley); and unmarried daughter Ivy (Katie McCall). Deon Gilbeau (Eric Williams), an old flame of Barbara's, appears with news about Beverly, and eventually the third daughter, Karen (Grey Garrett) arrives from Florida with her fiancé Steve (Bill Brock). The characters are stunningly real as they probe and wound one another, laying open old resentments. Nobody among this group has had it easy, and nobody is able to forgive. These people cannot quite contain their secrets about sex and addiction and violence, but they all struggle for a different kind of life that seems just beyond their grasp.
It was incredibly ambitious to consider bringing this large and carefully plotted story — originally told on a huge three-level set — to the tiny stage of the Little Theatre. Director Keri Wormald's vision and skill are evident in the result, which could not be more satisfying. Phil Hayes' set solves the space problems beautifully, adding an appropriate note of claustrophobia, lit with perfect functionality by Matthew Landwehr.
The performances Wormald elicits from her cast are among the most fearless and committed I've seen on a Richmond stage. Bass and Bridgewater make their characters real and flawed and lovable; McCall is heartbreaking in her mousiness but discloses a steely spine. Brock is frighteningly sleazy, and Stanley is absolutely believable as a 14-year-old of uncanny maturity.
Above all, as mother and daughter locked in fearsome battle, Richards and Price are just breathtaking. Richards is a wily, heedless animal of an addict, willing to claw her way through what's left of her life; her performance is lithe and physical. Price shows bottomless grit as she faces truths, one after another in a seemingly endless progression, that nearly take her down, always finding her own reserve of rage in response.
"August: Osage County" is Letts' masterpiece, and this production honors its greatness.
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