August: Osage County, Free-Rain Theatre Company, ACT Hub, 5-15 Sept

 

This production shares three cast members with the last time Free Rain ran this show, almost a decade ago (review here), all playing the same roles - but this is very far from a rote production. A modern epic American Family Drama, feeling like it summarises all the great American plays into one outsized epic, from the addiction issues of Eugene O'Neill to the weird regional activities of Sam Shepherd to the speechifying about the nature of America of Tony Kushner, this is a play that contains multitudes as three generations of an Oklahoma family gather in the wake of the disappearance of the patriarch - with three daughters returning to deal with their pill-addicted and happily-pasisng-on-the-genrational-trauma mother, the various husbands and partners, the local police, the aunt-uncle-and-cousin relations and a recently-hired live-in housekeeper. Beginning in 2007 at Chicago's famed Steppenwolf theatre, the original production transferred to Broadway and to London's national theatre and a tour hosted by the Sydney theatre Company, before the film was released (cut down to a more audience-friendly length) with a big name cast that never quite recaptured the theatrical energy of the play. 

It remains Letts' masterpiece - the plays he wrote before had a sharp incisive power (particularly "Killer Joe" and "Bug" but his later work doesn't quite have the urgency - Letts has shifted into an acting career largely made up of being senior patriarch figures in series like "Homeland" and movies like "Lady Bird", "The Post", "Little Women" and "Ford v Ferrari" - it's a very classically well made play, from the three act structure basically built into it by the uninterrupted roller coaster of act two, which takes this hothouse of a family and turns the boiler up until it explodes, with the third act remaining to pick up the pieces left behind. Cate Clelland gives the intimate Hub space an epic power, playing it longways and finding as many inches as possible of stage space to let the family sprawl all over the house. She maintains space and focus even as the various members of the Weston-Fordham-Aiken clans bicker and yell, often simultaneously across the space. There's a sense of control in among the chaos as we're always brought back to what matters, which is the emotions and tensions between family members, whether they be hostility, love, frustration or lust.

Karen Vickery as the matriarch is the mother from hell, and seizes the opportunity to ride a role that allows her to play everything from pathetic incoherence in the worst of her sedated-delusion to concentrated focussed venom as she reaches out to destroy family members one by one. Louise Bennet makes a return after a long time away from Canberra stages as the most prominent of the three daughters, dealing with her own parental frustrations, her own frayed marriage and her own ability to shoot venom at family members at the climax of the second act. Tracy Noble as Aunt Mattie Fae starts as a gossiping side figure before it becomes more apparent how great her own level of venom is, and what she's held in for years and is now finding an opportunity to release. Crystal Mahon is compelling as the somewhat crushed Ivy after long exposure to her mother, and brings hope as she finds a secret way to escape before a final brutal secret hits her like a brick. David Bennett handles Beverly's long opening monologue with aplomb, setting up the character and the nature of the family early. Bruce Hardie gives Bill a gentle generosity as he realises how deeply he's disengaged from his wife and how impossible it is to return. Michael Sparks similarly has a powerful humanity as the mostly-quiet-but-rebelllious when riled Charles. Richard Manning is suitably skin crawling as the awful Steve. Lachlan Rufffy is hapless, adorably labradorish and astonishingly vulnerable. Ella Buckley as the awkwardly prepubescent Jean draws attention as she tries and often fails to stand by her values in the face of the rest of her bullheaded family. Karina Hudson gives Karen a sense of a self that has decided to ignore as much as possible around her to avoid feeling damage, at the expense of parts of her humanity. Rob Drennan as Sheriff Deon is a warm honest presence who is clearly invested in parts of the families history they may not even remember, and Andrea Garcia's Johnna provides a strong observer figure, someone who absorbs all the tension around her without betraying too much judgment. 

This is an epic and powerful production, and well worth the three-hours-and-change of your time in the theatre - a high-tension family drama that takes us through all the darker sides of family history and leaves us wrung out at the other end happy we can leave these people behind and hoping some of them survive intact.