Perth Voice Interactive

AS the world looks on, astonished at the theatrics being played out on the stage of the White House, Perth has an opportunity to observe August: Osage County. 

It’s a stunner of a play that uses the metaphor of the collapse of an American family to interrogate the internal contradictions that have slowly rotted the USA such that many people failed to notice.

The setting is Oklahoma’s largest county, Osage, which is adjacent to the Osage Native American reservation, a reality that quietly suffuses the play. 

It is an area where stalwart European pioneers eradicated both the bison and the Native Americans to erect their comfortable lives at enormous environmental cost. 

The state has consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates for 60 years. 

Donald Trump won over 66% of the Oklahoma vote in 2024.

Readers of Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s book, Deaths of Despair will know that opioid addiction is ravaging the USA to the extent that national life expectancy is declining. 

What is more alarming is research published by the American Medical Association’s JAMA journal following the 2016 election that showed that voting for Donald Trump directly correlated with areas with the largest number of opioid prescriptions.

August: Osage County was written before Trump’s arrival as president, but it surveys the territory, pointing to the future that has now arrived. 

As director Eamon Flack says in his notes in the play program, even though it was written in 2006, “the America of the Trump era is all there in prototype. 

The questions the play asks are the same questions we all face now as Trump begins his transition back to the White House.”

In the play three generations of the Weston family have gathered in the high heat of summer in the decrepit, over-heated family home presided over by the cancer-wracked, poison-tongued, opioid-addicted matriarch Violet (portrayed to perfection by Pamela Rabe). 

The gathering is forced upon the characters because the family patriarch, retired poet and full-time alcoholic Beverly (Geoff Kelso), has gone missing.

Beverly gently opens the play with quotations from T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. 

His is a voice of old school liberalism and sensitivity. 

Will those values be heard again in this house where the thermostat is always set to maximum? 

All the characters swelter under the dictate of Violet, who has lost thermal sensitivity, possibly due to chemotherapy. 

Or is this a reference to global warming? It certainly is a hot house of emotional intensity as the family’s fissures erupt.

There are many high points of dramatic emotionality in this play, but what made it a hit with the opening night audience was the skilful use of black humour laced through the script. 

At three hours length with two 15-minute intermissions August: Osage County could be a heavy load for an audience. 

But the note-perfect pacing of the material and top-notch acting by the large ensemble kept the crowd gasping at the revelations and laughing at the mayhem. 

Nobody lingered in the foyer at the end of the breaks; everyone came barrelling back to their seats for the start of each act.

There are one or two points of reference where an Australian audience might need a bit of help. 

One is a rendition of the unofficial US national anthem, America the Beautiful. 

The song nearly has the status of a hymn in the US and its appearance in the play anchors it as a national commentary, not only a tale of family dysfunction.

The second is a mural visually referencing a George Carlin painting showing a bison running from its hunter. 

Carlin was the great illustrator of Native American life, but in the play the Native American in Carlin’s painting is missing. 

To an American this would immediately call to mind the erasure of Indigenous culture.

In August: Osage County the worst of America is exposed in microcosm. 

There is casual racism, misogyny, passing reference to imperialist use of mercenaries, selfish individualism and a wilful refusal to deal with the national foundation that is shared with Australia, genocide.

As is said in the script: “You know, this country was always pretty much a whorehouse, but at least it used to have some promise. Now it’s just a shithole.”

Of course, now Donald Trump uses that last word to describe certain countries and through the magic of the AUKUS submarine deal that status is coming to us. 

How will this all end, echoing The Hollow Men, with a bang or a whimper? Luckily, August: Osage County has come in time to warn us.

August: Osage County
Black Swan Until March 16

by BARRY HEALY