August: Osage County is a darkly comedic play by Tracy Letts. The action takes place over the course of several weeks in August inside the three-story home of Beverly and Violet Weston outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The play is reminiscent of Dumas’ play “Camille,” centering as it does on the waning days of a sharp-tongued addicted dying woman who is surrounded by a large cast of eccentric lazy hangers-on revealed as various love-hate relationships unfold.
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Hilton Als (New Yorker):

“Tracy Letts beautifully captures the puritan streak in the American grain… He is an artist who creates drama by pitting violence against our banal sense of decency…
The action takes place in what Letts describes as “a rambling country house outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma, sixty miles northwest of Tulsa… At right, the kitchen. Country cooks have served their duty here, and amidst the clutter and grease, their ghosts perhaps still patrol… ‘ The house is a mess because its proprietors, Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts, the playwright’s father) and his wife, Violet (Deanna Dunagan), are too busy drinking to notice the decay, let alone the décor. Still, Beverly—a stalled poet—is aware enough of his and Violet’s decline to want to hire a maid to cook and help care for Violet, who is on a lot of medication, some of it prescribed: the poor thing has cancer of the mouth, as well as of the mind. She’s constantly stoned, shouting at whoever will listen to her drama, which alternates between histrionics, dime-store readings of others, and waspish rejoinders… Beverly hires Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero), a Native American woman, as much to be an audience for Violet’s anger as to deal with the household chores.”