Hartford has seen more than its fair share of sprawling generational dramas this year. We've just had Horton Foote's three-part, nine-hour Orphans' Home Cycle at Hartford Stage, which earlier in the year also produced Foote's Dividing the Estate, a transfer from Broadway. Now the Bushnell Performing Arts Center joins in, presenting another recent New York hit, a comedy-drama to complement their season of mostly musicals (see below).
August: Osage County takes place in Oklahoma, and shares with Foote's Texas-based plays a Southwestern twang and fraught family dynamics. The published edition of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer-winning script contains an epigraph (from another Southern epic, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men) that says it all: "The good old family reunion… is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium."
This reunion, which brings four Weston sisters and their families to the rambling old house of their childhoods, is unplanned. Their alcoholic father has disappeared after hiring a young Cherokee woman to look after his wife, whose addiction to various prescription narcotics makes her paranoid and unpredictable. The parents' dysfunctions aren't the only tentacles wrapped around the play's kinfolk. Along with the standard jealousies and recriminations, there's adultery, incest and pedophilia, all of it played out in a series of generational confrontations that veer between black comedy and caustic drama.
Winding through the script are themes and images from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men"—the shadow that falls "between the idea and the reality" of life in this "cactus land"—and the play ends like the poem, "not with a bang but a whimper." But the characters are all intelligent, literate folks (the missing father had been a university professor and briefly famous poet), so both their venom and their despair are laced with wit.
Although the playwright, Tracy Letts, is a man, the play's male characters are almost subsidiary to the women, including the erratic matriarch (Estelle Parsons, who also played the role on Broadway), her four squabbling daughters, and Jean, the pot-smoking teenage daughter of one of the Weston sisters and her philandering husband. I spoke on the phone with Emily Kinney, the 20-something actress who plays Jean, when the company was in Seattle on the nationwide tour that continues through next spring. She said Letts "understands women's voices really well, and he has a really good understanding of human beings, regardless of their gender. He also told us that early on in the development process, the actresses would say sometimes, 'I don't know if a girl would say this,' so he has those people helping, too."
La-las and ha-has
August: Osage County is a bit of a departure for the Bushnell mainstage. Most of its theatrical offerings are big musicals more or less fresh from Broadway. Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein led off in October and is followed next month by the ABBA musical, Mamma Mia! That show and The Lion King, coming in January for a three-week run, are popular-demand reprise appearances at the Bushnell. In the spring the recent Lincoln Center revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific sails in, followed by the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess.
Also slotted in are two musicals—Tony Award winners from 2007 and 2008—that break some of the usual song-and-dance rules. In the Heights sees in the New Year. The show uses hip-hop, soul and Latin music, along with a semi-bilingual libretto, to depict young love, generational conflict, big dreams and thwarted ambitions over three sweltering days in the Dominican neighborhood of the Bronx.
Spring Awakening, which hits Hartford in February, is the surprising marriage of indie rock with an iconoclastic 19th-century drama. Frank Wedekind's play about adolescents awakening to sex—and shame—scandalized strait-laced German society with its portrayal of homosexuality, masturbation, abortion and teen suicide. The musical retains the period setting with its moral strictures, but reflects the universality of teenage angst when the characters burst into song with screaming, in-your-face rock.
The Bushnell's season also includes pop and classical concerts, children's theater and celebrity lectures, plus two ongoing series that thematically intersect this month. The bimonthly comedy showcase Ha! Ha! Hartford, hosted by WTIC-FM personality Damon Scott, is held in the Bushnell's more intimate second stage, the Belding Theatre. The Nov. 20th installment features three up-and-coming comics whose pre-stand-up lives provide material for their monologues: ex-lawyer Al Lubel, ex-addict Jesse Joyce and ex-opera singer Tommy Anzalone.
The Connecticut Forum gets in on the comedy act this month with a free-ranging conversation among four humorists on the role of social and political satire in this grim world. The Forum's annual series of talks and panel discussions on a variety of themes aim to stimulate "the free and active exchange of ideas… to inform, challenge, entertain, inspire and build bridges" between people in diverse communities. The participants in "It's Satire!" are Jason Alexander, Seinfeld's George Costanza; Randy Cohen, author of the syndicated column The Ethicist; The Daily Show's "Most Senior Correspondent," Samantha Bee, and the show's former head writer, David Javerbaum."
For Bushnell schedules, info and tickets, visit www.bushnell.org or call (860) 987-5900.
