It's Team Steppenwolf in August vs. Kosovo
There are ensembles, and then there are ensembles. It takes the latter to overcome the uncompromising and uncontrollable sort of 500-alarm rumpus raised by a newly sovereign nation. As the lights came up on August: Osage County Feb. 17, the ensemble found itself pitted against exactly that. Having just declared independence from Serbia after a bloody, 12-year war, Kosovo was in a mood to celebrate. And so it did. By the millions in the Eastern Europe, and by the tens of thousands all up and down New York City's Broadway. The streets were essentially impassable around the Imperial Theater, as hundreds of honking cars and joyously screaming marchers created a kinetic, all-but-impenetrable barricade that stretched the length of midtown Manhattan. As cabbies cursed a blue streak, cops gave up trying to direct traffic.
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August: Osage County. Photo by Joan Marcus
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Inside the Imperial, August was battling the ambient cacophony of history in the making. Think of a fire engine at full-screaming throttle. Now multiply that by a few hundred decibels and add in a screaming mass of humanity bellowing with Gay Pride Parade gusto. In all, it was sound design hell. By the time Violet Weston a.k.a. Deanna Dunagan reached the drug-addled Eric Clapton sing-along that is the first act finale, the cast had already expended the amount of energy it usually uses to get through the duration of the entire show. Or so opined an usher who claimed to have seen August 40 times ( and could, incidentally, recite vast swaths of dialogue on command ) .
'We can't do anything about the Kosovo!' she repeated patiently as intermisshing Imperial patrons demanded that the blaring car horns/screaming crowds/celebratory gunshots be silenced. 'They're on oxygen backstage,' she added. 'They've had to adjust their volume to compete.'
If it was a competition, Team Steppenwolf emerged victorious. Truthfully, Kosovo didn't have a chance. It takes an ensemble of brass balls, iron will, extraordinary focus and essentially superhuman thespiasity to overcome the din of a victorious revolution. But that is basically the definition of an ensemble wherein fire-breathing duo of Dunagan and Amy Morton lead the likes of Francis Guinan, Jeff Perry, Mariann Mayberry, Sally Murphy, Ian Barford and the force of nature that is Rondi Reed into the breach six days a week.
'We were all cracking up backstage,' Morton noted after the performance, 'Welcome to New York. '
Since it left Chicago, August: Osage County has become even more emotionally explosive and bitterly, blackly hilarious. There is an increasing insistent drumbeat foretelling a Pulitzer for playwright Tracy Letts, multiple-Tonys for the cast, and a national tour. On April 29, the production moves next door to the Music Box Theatre for an extended run.
And amid all the blazing success of August: Osage County, there is loss. Cast member Dennis Letts, 73, died Fri., Feb. 24. The playwright's father played patriarch Beverly Weston, whose disappearance triggers the galvanic familial meltdown that unspools over August's riveting three and a half hours.
Letts' opening monologue was plainspoken poetry, a sardonic, wry, wise and melancholic symphony of ruminations on T.S. Eliot, weariness and the profound absurdity of life. It the sort of quietly breathtaking scene that makes the heart leap like a marcher in a joyful parade.
For more information about August: Osage County, visit www.augustonbroadway.com .
Seafarer a devilishly fine voyage
Walk a block west of the August marquee where Deanna Dunagan's rattlesnake glare looms down on 45th Street and you'll find another rivetingly dysfunctional family in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer.
Meet the brothers Harkin: Sharky ( David Morse ) , a dry drunk trying mightily and miserably to stay off the Poteen while tending to his whiskey-guzzling, all-but-incontinent, soap-averse older sibling Richard.
( Jim Norton is spry as a demon leprechaun as the kind of endlessly resourceful alcoholic that only the desperation of impoverished, rural Ireland can produce. )
Those who recall Morse only from his underrated days as an intern on TV's St. Elsewhere are in for a marvelous revelation: Morse has fathoms television never hinted at and, in Sharky, creates a complex antihero of both terrifying anger and boundless, weary compassion.
McPherson's supernaturally spooky tale is a long night's journey into Christmas Day, unfolding over the course of a Christmas Eve poker game where the stakes are hellishly high. Literally. The wild card in the game among the Harkins and their equally dissolute friends is Mr. Lockhart ( Ciaran Hinds ) , a stranger in an ominously well-cut suit. As a Christmas-averse menace intent on claiming a debt with eternal implications, Hinds is as sharp and scary as the point on a pentangle.
McPherson ( who also directed the piece ) is a master of that singular wit that's as black as the rotting potatoes of the Great Famine. With The Seafarer, he's in devilishly fine form. And not that anyone asked, but we've figured out the perfect cast for its Chicago production with John Mahoney as Richard, John Judd as Sharky and Larry Yando as the diabolical Mr. Lockhart.
For more information about The Seafarer, visit www.seafarertheplay.com .