One of the worst things about “the lost years,” as Tracy Letts likes to call his stint as a journeyman actor in Los Angeles in the 1990s, was always being surrounded by strangers. “It all feels like the first day of school,” Letts says. “You don’t know anybody, and you get put in this little trailer like a prison cell, and before you know it you’re in front of the camera and you’re told, ‘Do it.’ You don’t feel any support. You feel like you’ve got to throw down—to prove yourself, right now, in this moment.” He shakes his head as if to drive out the memory of it. “I like movies, but I don’t like making them. It took me a few years to figure that out, but I finally did. I prefer the theatre.”
And the theatre prefers Tracy Letts. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in particular is crazy about him, having featured the author of Bug and Killer Joe as an actor in more than a dozen productions, made him an ensemble member in 2002 and produced the premiere of his play Man from Nebraska, a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2004. And Steppenwolf has Letts’s latest and most ambitious play, August: Osage County, a sprawling, three-act, multigenerational family drama featuring a cast of 13, on its stage through Aug. 26.
At a staff reading of the play in April, it’s clear that Steppenwolf has become for Letts the artistic home that Hollywood could never be. As the cast—including the playwright himself, who’s filling in for a missing ensemble member—begins to assemble behind a row of music stands on stage, it feels like a family reunion. Amy Morton, his co-star in the January through May run of Pinter’s Betrayal and the lead in August: Osage County, gives him a hug. So does artistic director Martha Lavey, who commissioned August and has scheduled Letts’s next script, Superior Donuts, for the 2007-08 season. As the three-hour reading unfolds in front of about 30 members of the Steppenwolf staff, the attentive crowd becomes Letts’s ideal audience, alternately rocking with laughter and coiling into gut-clenched tension when the onstage conflict escalates.
Set in a rambling farmhouse in rural Oklahoma, the play begins with the disappearance of a family’s patriarch, who has committed suicide. His three adult daughters—including Barbara, played by Morton—return to support their matriarch, Violet, whose addiction to pills and lacerating tongue make for a series of funny but increasingly disturbing scenes that eventually erupt into spectacularly protracted physical violence. (“I thought my stage-fighting days were over, but I guess not,” Morton says before the reading. “I’m really excited about being in this play, but it’s going to kill me.”)
At the end, the applause is loud and long, and the feedback is generous, especially from women impressed with Letts’s female characters. “Awesome,” one says. “Very truthful,” says another. And Steppenwolf’s own matriarch, perched on the apron of the stage, is brimming with pride. “What an honor it is for Steppenwolf to be able to present this play,” Lavey says. “Thank you, actors, and thank you, Tray…cee…Letts!”
A few days later, Letts shows up at Wishbone, a country-and-western-themed diner a few blocks from the Chicago home he shares with Nicole Wiesner, managing director of Trap Door Theatre, one of the city’s scrappy storefront troupes. With Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn wailing in the background, the actor-playwright tucks into a Denver omelet and a bowl of cheese grits. The long run of Betrayal has tired him; with his creeping crow’s feet and high forehead crowned by a sagebrush growth of receding, graying hair, he looks older than his 41 years. (Then again, says Michael Shannon, who starred in Bug in London and Off Broadway, “Tracy’s looked 40 since he was born.”) But if Letts is working too hard, he’s grateful for the opportunity.
“I’m really lucky, because Steppenwolf’s a great gig,” he says. “Not many artists have the security of knowing you’ll always have a place to hang your hat. I do think I thrive in that community setting, as opposed to Los Angeles, where it’s pretty much every man for himself. Here in Chicago, we’re taught the ensemble acting way, which is that if you’re in a five-character show, it’s better to look out for the other people in the cast, because then you always have four people looking out for you.”
Letts’s appreciation for the supportive atmosphere of the Chicago theatre community is heightened by his youth in Durant, Okla., where he and his parents, both college teachers, felt like outsiders in a community that seemed to prize sports and hunting over artistic pursuits. Growing up in “DOO-rant,” as Letts pronounces it, “I was small, not athletic, not coordinated. The fact that I was smart, or smart-aleck, was not valued.” (Letts’s father, Dennis, later became a film actor and plays Beverly in August: Osage County; his mother, Billie, wrote a novel, Where the Heart Is, that was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 1998.) The alienation from Durant continues to this day, and the feeling remains mutual. During a recent homecoming visit, Letts and his brother, Shawn, went to a movie, only to hear the ticket-taker say, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
In his early twenties, Letts found his way to Chicago, where he broke in at Steppenwolf in a young-audiences production of The Glass Menagerie and, later, in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, whose cast included ensemble members Jeff Perry and Rondi Reed (both of whom are in August: Osage County). And as he was beginning to make his mark as an actor, he was also writing his first play, Killer Joe, a black comedy set in a Texas trailer park. When first produced at the Next Lab in Evanston in 1993, the play—in which Shannon played a young man who hires an assassin to kill his mother for the insurance money, only to have the killer sexually target his sister—appalled most local critics with its nudity and violence. The notable exception was Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune, whose enthusiasm for Killer Joe helped make it a hit soon to be repeated in Edinburgh and London.
“I reacted to it on a visceral level,” Christiansen recalls. “I loved the melodramatic action, and I loved the in-your-face performances. It was terrific pulp fiction—the plotting was very good, and the characters, though miserable people, were fully realized. It wasn’t all blood and gore.”
The play was so gripping that it inspired a young Irish playwright who saw it in London and came to regard Letts’s success as a kind of template. Martin McDonagh found in Killer Joe the liberation he needed to write The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Pillowman and other plays. “He admired how Killer Joe got the audience’s adrenaline pumping, which doesn’t happen very often in the theatre,” Shannon recalls. “I think for Martin, seeing someone being successful doing what he imagined himself doing, especially in terms of the vulgarity on stage, was key.”
Letts followed Killer Joe with Bug, a paranoid thriller set in an Oklahoma hotel room. It was a hit in London and, later, Off Broadway, where Hollywood director William Friedkin (The French Connection and The Exorcist) saw it. He called Letts, who was appearing at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directed by Morton, and asked the playwright to pen a screenplay. The film, starring Shannon alongside Ashley Judd, Harry Connick Jr. and Brian F. O’Byrne, opened May 25. Will Letts be tempted to take another crack at Hollywood? Or is he interested in moving to New York, where he got critical raves for Bug and as an actor in fellow Steppenwolf ensemble member Austin Pendleton’s recent Orson’s Shadow? Not a chance.
“If someone asked me to write another screenplay, fine, but I’m not going to move to L.A.,” he says. “And New York’s been great to me—the critics there have been far better to me than the Chicago critics ever were—but it’s not my city. I’m a Chicago theatre artist.”
In the early stages of his playwriting career, Letts was not exactly prolific. But after his return to Chicago from L.A. in 2001, he’s been producing scripts more steadily, and the results show a maturing writer of increasing power. Audiences familiar with Killer Joe and Bug were unprepared for Man from Nebraska, a quietly profound, rather beautifully muted play about a middle-aged man’s crisis of faith. “You could tell it was the same writer, but it was on a much larger canvas and a much more elevated level,” Christiansen says. “It showed a considerable advance for Tracy, both in technique and scope. I think he’s certainly got a large career ahead of him as a writer for the theatre.”
And many at Steppenwolf believe that August: Osage County is Letts’s best work yet. Ensemble member Anna D. Shapiro, who’s directing the premiere, recalls starting the lengthy script for the first time one night at 9:30 p.m., thinking she’d barely make it through the first act by bedtime. “I could not put it down,” she says. “After I finished it, I called Tracy and said, ‘I just read your play and I have to tell you: You’re a wonderful writer, and I have no idea who you are.’ I think he took it as the compliment I meant it to be.”
Edward Sobel, Steppenwolf’s director of new play development, notes that the author seems to be in dialogue with the pantheon of American playwrights from Eugene O’Neill to Edward Albee. “Their handprints are very much deliberately present in August, which features an alcoholic patriarch and a drug-addicted matriarch,” Sobel says. “If that doesn’t remind you of James and Mary Tyrone, then you haven’t been reading much.” Other sections of the play consciously echo George and Martha from Virginia Woolf, and the ending bears certain resemblances to Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.
“Absolutely true,” Letts says a bit sheepishly. “It’s a tough conversation to have, because some of it’s conscious, some of it’s subconscious, and I don’t want to be seen as comparing myself to writers who are far better than me. But yeah, I read a lot of plays, so there are reference points.”
Now he’s writing his first play set in the Windy City. Superior Donuts, about immigrants and assimilation, takes place in a doughnut shop in the hardscrabble but quickly gentrifying neighborhood of Uptown. If that sounds like Mamet country, Letts brings to it his sensibility as an immigrant of sorts, a man whose own assimilation—into the grand tradition of Chicago theatre—is now complete.
That idea came to him last year when he went to the Chicago Public Library to receive an award for his writing. His parents were in town for the event, and several of his closest Steppenwolf friends were in the audience. “I was introduced, and when I was walking up to the dais I had a great feeling of being home,” he recalls. “I knew I wanted to write a Chicago play, because I didn’t feel like a transplant anymore. I didn’t have to keep saying, when people asked, ‘I’m from Oklahoma originally.’ Now I could just say, ‘I’m from Chicago.'”
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based writer about the theatre.
