Concrete Playground

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company is theatrical genius. Their production of company member Tracy Letts' pulitzer-prize winning play August: Osage County, is extraordinarily good. I mean, look at the set — it's a house, dammit, a three-story house. And they use it — they use the whole thing. The ensemble performance is of a standard rarely seen and the play itself is brilliantly written — clever, funny and poignant in relatively equal measures.

Beverly Weston (Chelcie Ross), a once-was poet, now alcoholic (not the depressingly cool Bukowski type, rather the talented-but-crushed-under-the-weight-of-family-life type), walks out of his house one day and doesn't return after benevolently providing for his drug-addicted, cancer-infested wife, brilliantly played by Deanna Dunagan. In support of their vituperative matriarch of a mother, Beverly's three daughters converge on the family home where the usual, unusual deep family dysfunction crescendos in the most wicked dinner table scene EVER.

The characters are so familiar that they verge on cliche — a wife who has given everything to support her husband, who naturally is leaving her for a student; a nagging, motor-mouth aunt whose sweet and kind doormat husband finally discovers his balls; a sister joyously in love with her sleaze of a fiance (15 is old enough, right?) and so on. And, while I am weary of the constant repetition of gender stereotypes in straight-laced, narrative-based naturalism plays, Steppenwolf's August: Osage County delivers them so well that I'm almost convinced that this is just how it was/is.
You may have seen the content all before (in various theatrical configurations) but you will, most likely, never have seen it this good.

*tickets for under 30s are only $40