By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
A couple years ago Lane Hakel, reflecting on why the Black Swamp Players needed their own space, noted that using the First United Methodist Church hall limited the plays they could stage.
Scripts had to pass muster with the church. Certain adult topics and language were definitely off-limits. Some lines had to be changed, some work was a no-go.
And the Players, grateful as they were for the church’s generosity in providing them a stage, complied.
Still Hakel said he would like to perform more edgy material in his home town and not have to travel to stages in Toledo and beyond for that experience.
Now in its first season in the theater on Oak Street, the Players are staging “August: Osage County.” With its raw language that reflects its raw view of family dynamics, the play, in one fell swoop, makes up for all those years of restraint.
Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play earns four stars for trigger warnings – sexual predation, drug use, domestic violence, and suicide. And with an all-star cast of local and regional actors reveling in these roles, it earns four stars for quality.
This is a riveting, at times disturbing, look at one family’s dysfunction. The audience has front row seats to the drama.
“August: Osage County,” directed by Heath Diehl, will be staged Feb. 18, 19, 25, and 26 at 7 p.m. and Feb. 20 and 27 at 1 p.m. in the troupe’s theater at 115 E. Oak Street, Bowling Green. Tickets are $20 for general admission. Click for tickets.
The play opens with Beverly Weston (Bill Pierson) in the process of hiring a Cheyenne woman, Johnna (Cyndy Brookover) to help with household tasks and tending to his wife who has mouth cancer and addicted to a laundry list of drugs.
Weston, as a young man, published an award-winning book of poetry, and hasn’t written anything since. That explains the references to T.S. Eliot and John Berryman in the job interview.
The interview is more about ascertaining whether Johnna actually would want the job. She is supremely suited to the task. For the rest of the play, she bears quiet witness to the havoc that enfolds in the over-stuffed, steamy Weston home. Quiet, that is, until called to act.
That it takes her so long to be provoked by a family that seemingly has provocation etched into its genetic code is a testament to her saintly demeanor.
The wife, Violet (Monica Hiris), taunts Johnna on meeting her. But then that’s just Violet treating the young woman as family.
When Beverly goes missing, the family comes together. They fear the worst, and middle daughter Ivy (Tiffany Scarola), the daughter who didn’t move away, bluntly states that her father is dead.
Her judgment is not confirmed until after the oldest sister, Barbara, shows up with her own troubled family. Her husband Bill (Hakel), a college English professor, is having an affair with a student just a few years older than the couple’s 14-year-old daughter Jean (Kylie Schmehl).
Also, on hand are Violet’s sister Mattie Fae (Karen Noble) and her pothead husband Charlie (Steve Bishop).
The sheriff (Warren Clifton) delivers the news that Beverly’s bloated body was found in the lake.
In the following days, this family portrait fills out with ditzy little sister Karen (Samantha Heater) and her seriously creepy fiancé Steve (Jonathan Chambers). Little Charlie (John Toth), Mattie Fae’s son, finally arrives having slept through the funeral.
All these characters have deep back stories that are revealed in tense and angry scenes around the kitchen table, or in the cramped rooms of the Weston’s Oklahoma home. Sarcasm, the more acidic the better, is the favored form of humor and is laced through the plot. You almost laugh despite yourself. The way the plot tangles and unwinds makes it difficult to single out scenes without spoiling plot points.
Every one of the actors digs into their character, making them almost disturbingly real.
Violet stumbles and jabs, like an injured animal. Barbara tries to control her and everything else, as her own life spins out of control. Ivy may have found happiness, or an assurance of a lifetime of misery.
Schmehl, a BGSU student, does a wonderful job as a teen who sees herself as more sophisticated and worldly than she is. Her insistence on saying she’s 15, not 14, signals her childishness and vulnerability.
Mattie Fae is embittered by a tough upbringing that involves an assault with a hammer, and yet her negativity toward Little Charles seems extreme even for her.
Bishop as Charles has a great set piece as he’s called upon to deliver grace at the funeral dinner. As he struggles to find the right bromides, his halting prayer reveals the truth about the family, he’s trying to paper over. He’s the rare decent human in the bunch, and yet most of them are sympathetic to an extent.
As uncomfortable as it is at times, this is a family reunion that drama lovers will not want to skip.
