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Programme extract for August: Osage County
An extract from Christopher Bigsby's programme article:
'For Reagan, the family reunion, in particular, brings warmth, comfort, strength and joy. Not for him, then, A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Buried Child which explore the corrosive secrets of those for whom love and contempt can co-exist. Who, after all, knows someone’s vulnerabilities better than those who have lived under the same roof, those linked by blood? Who else knows where the bodies are buried so that they can be resurrected when it serves their purpose?
Not that the British are significantly different. A Prime Minister advocated family values even as he was busy violating them, while playwrights from Shakespeare to Pinter have found in the family unit the conflict that is the motor of drama. Not much warmth, comfort etc in King Lear’s reunions, or in Oedipus’s come to that. Perhaps the family is the natural place to explore human hopes and failures, the different generations not only at odds with each other but also underscoring the ironies of time. For the fact of those generations is a reminder of entropy, that what lives must end, for the most part, not with a bang but a whimper, the lines, incidentally, with which August: Osage County nearly ends.'
Copyright Christopher Bigsby
Read the rest of Christopher Bigsby's about the American family and its place in American drama, in the illustrated programme for August: Osage County. Also included is a piece from Richard Christiansen on the history of the legendary Steppenwolf company founded by Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney and (now appearing in August: Osage County) Jeff Perry; Anna D Shapiro introducing the play, with rehearsal photographs, pictures of Steppenwolf's dramatic history, and full details about the cast and creative team.
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