St. Petersburg Times Fine Arts Writer John Fleming was knocked out by the American Stage production of “August: Osage County” at the Palladium. This show runs only through Sunday, so if you love theater, you don’t want to miss this production.
Here’s an excerpt from Fleming’s review:
ST. PETERSBURG — It’s got the kind of dramatic twist you don’t often experience in American Stage productions: A play about alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, divorce, pedophilia, suicide and cancer. But this unrelenting tale of woe does not come across as a tragedy. Instead, it had the audience howling with laughter at Sunday’s matinee.
And in a further twist, the performance isn’t even in the theater’s own downtown building, but in the Palladium a few blocks up the street.
Combined, these elements make for one of the most satisfying theater experiences in recent memory.
Just about every hot-button topic you can think of is part of August: Osage County, except for perhaps homosexuality (and there are a couple lesbian wisecracks). Yet Tracy Letts’ celebrated play kept the audience in stitches during its almost four-hour performance. Never has the dysfunction of the American family been so hilarious.
Do you believe that an absurd, graphically vulgar account of a drug-addicted old woman smuggling Darvocet into a psych ward could be roll-in-the-aisles funny? Don’t ask me why or how — the genius of plain-spoken American vernacular is the only explanation I’ve got, and I realize that sounds pedantic for such a scene — but it brings down the house.
At the center of Letts’ black comedy is Violet Weston, the sharp-tongued, pill-popping matriarch of an Oklahoma clan, brought to monstrous life by Lisa McMillan in the sprawling production, directed by Todd Olson, artistic producing director of American Stage. In McMillan’s ferocious performance, Violet is a Medea of the plains, psychically destroying her three grown daughters, who have gathered for the funeral of their father, Beverly (Michael Edwards), an alcoholic and failed poet. Not for nothing does Beverly mention John Berryman and Hart Crane, a pair of American poet-suicides, in his opening soliloquy before he vanishes from the play.
What makes McMillan’s performance so compelling is that along with the vehement venom of Violet’s truth telling, the actor also communicates her warmth, though it surfaces only in fleeting, quicksilver moments: a line from Emily Dickinson dredged up from a drugged stupor; a bizarre, heartbreaking childhood story about some boots, told to her daughters.
To read the full review visit: http://www.tampabay.com/features/performingarts/review-august-osage-county-is-comedic-masterpiece/1198369
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