56 pages • 1 hour read
Tracy LettsAugust: Osage County
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Tracy Letts
When Tracy Letts (b. 1965) was 10 years old, his maternal grandfather drowned in suicide, and his grandmother fell into years of prescription narcotic addiction. Letts was born in Oklahoma, where his family settled before the territory became a state. His grandmother was the product of an abusive mother. She got married at age 15 and became a mother by 16. August: Osage County is based on Lett’s family and childhood experiences, but it’s liberally fictionalized. When Letts’s mother read the play, she commented that Letts had been very generous to her mother, which some might find surprising given Violet’s tendency toward irrationality and downright cruelty. Lett’s parents supported the play, and his father, Dennis, even originated the role of Beverly Weston.
Letts, inspired by his father, began his theatre career as an actor. He moved to Chicago at age 20, where he worked with Steppenwolf Theatre. Letts wrote his first play, Killer Joe, a violent dark comedy that premiered in 1993 to great critical acclaim, before transferring to Off-Off-Broadway in 1994 and to London in 1995. His second play, Bug, debuted in London in 1996 and Off-Broadway in 2004, wining the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.
Letts’s third play, Man From Nebraska, opened at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2003 and was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Of the 10 plays Letts has written, his next work, August: Osage County, is arguably his most famous and critically celebrated. The play’s themes reflect those of his earlier works. His first two plays, Killer Joe and Bug, are about violence and paranoia, with characters who are trapped in small, seedy spaces (a trailer home and a motel room) as the pressure mounts. They deploy elements of expressionism as the characters’ increasing tension and fear warps their reality. Letts shifted stylistically with Man from Nebraska, which traded shock value for a quieter and more contemplative narrative of a man grappling with his sense of faith. With August: Osage County, Letts takes on the scope of a large dysfunctional family, and their tension builds to fill a three-story set of a family home containing three generations of anger and trauma.
August: Osage County became one of only six plays in history to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. While Letts went on to write six more plays (as of 2023), his acting career continued to grow, and Letts won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for the 2013 Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Sociohistorical Context: Indigeneity and the Plains
August: Osage County isn’t just a narrative about family dysfunction. It is also about the Plains, as the Weston house is located in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, the county seat named for the Indigenous people of the Osage Nation. Before European colonization, the Osage nation roamed throughout their ancestral territory, which covered a large swath of central North America, including present-day Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, most of Arkansas and Illinois, and stretching into the northeast. But with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Osage Nation territory was included in the 530,000,000 acres that the United States bought from the French. In 1804, Osage leaders met with President Thomas Jefferson to negotiate peace and to allow Americans to continue exploring the west. With their population declining against the constant surge of European settlers, the Osage were persuaded to cede their homelands and relocate in 1810 to a reservation in pre-statehood Kansas. There, over the next few decades, their numbers were diminished by smallpox epidemics, war, and famine. Additionally, to the dismay of the Osage Nation, American settlers began occupying Osage land. They started their own farmsteads, and the Osage people turned to the US military for help. Ultimately, in 1870, a treaty between the Osage and Congress was ratified, determining that the Osage would sell their land in Kansas and relocate again in 1872, this time to pre-statehood Oklahoma.
Unlike most Indigenous nations, the Osage Nation purchased their reservation— 1.57 million acres, which became the same land as modern-day Osage County. Pawhuska is one of four towns in the county. For five years after removal, the Osage struggled to survive as the US government failed to pay the full annuity for their land or provide adequate clothing, food, or medical supplies. Winters were freezing and summers were hot and muggy. Their population dropped by about half. But the Osage people fought to acclimate and adapt, drawing up a constitution in 1881. At the same time, the federal government passed the Dawes Act of 1887, designed to force assimilation by giving 160 acres to each individual tribe member. Eligible tribe members were identified on national registries, and the federal government kept the rest of the land as surplus to make space for white settlers. However, since the Osage bought their land, they escaped this land-allotment at first. In 1889, the federal government refused to continue recognizing Osage governing council, pushing the tribe toward allotment so Indian Territory could be admitted into the union as the state of Oklahoma. Then, in 1896, a large amount of oil was discovered beneath Osage county, raising the stakes of defining the ownership of the land.
In 1906, they agreed to allotment but none of the land was considered surplus, and the Osage Nation as a collective held mineral rights to the land, which particularly meant oil. White homesteaders and government agencies resorted to illegal practices to obtain both land and oil royalties, including sneaking non-Osage people on the official tribe roster and committing about 60 largely uninvestigated murders of Osage oil rights-holders.
August: Osage County centers on a family, but it is also about land and place, which Letts stresses by including the region in the title. By naming the county in the title, rather than using “Pawhuska” or “Oklahoma,” Letts is invoking the name of the Indigenous nation from which it was taken. The Weston house is over a 100 years old, “probably built by a clan of successful Irish homesteaders” (9), which means that it was erected around the time when the Osage people were being forced to parcel out the tribal land that they paid for after they were obligatorily relocated, opening them up for that land to be acquired away. The family’s decades of abuse, unrest, and dysfunction reflect the moral complications of settling on stolen land. As Barbara complains, the Plains are so flat and hot that she jokes that they are like a “spiritual affliction” (30).
Literary Context: Tragedy in 20th-Century American Theatre
In August: Osage County, Letts explores generational trauma. While the play is semi-autobiographical, it also takes on the larger exploration of the tragedies of white middle-class families. Tragedy as a dramatic form originates with the Ancient Greeks and was theorized by Aristotle in his Poetics (c. 335 BCE), a treatise in which he analyzes Greek tragedies using Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) as a central example of the form. Aristotle argued that the purpose of tragic drama was catharsis, or the purgative emotional response that audiences experience, as the play induces pity and fear. In Greek tragedies, the central characters are of high status: royalty, heroes, nobility, or even gods. They are virtuous and serious, as plays about human weaknesses and vice were comedies. The protagonist is a tragic hero, who falls from their high stature to a low point or dies due to a tragic flaw and/or fate. This tragic structure identified by Aristotle continued to appear throughout theatre history, notably by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
By the 20th century, the notion of the virtuous nobleman or kings was outdated, leading some critics to argue that classical tragedy was as well. The horrors of World War I and World War II, weapons that mechanized and dehumanized killing, the previously unimaginable mass murder in the Holocaust, and the growing commodification of human time and labor through modern industrialization seemed to devalue human life altogether. Next to tens of millions of lives, the death of a single tragic hero seemed insignificant, or worse, a self-indulgence by the privileged upper class.
This existential crisis filtered into Western drama throughout the early 20th century. In 1949, two weeks after Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway, Miller published an essay in The New York Times entitled “Tragedy and the Common Man,” in which he argues in defense of the idea that a common man, such as the play’s protagonist, Willy Loman, is a suitable tragic hero for the 20th century. Though the American Dream implies that anyone can be a hero, social and economic injustice destroy the would-be modern hero, driving audiences to think about these injustices and fight to fix them.
Willy Loman is a tragic hero who dies by suicide so his family can collect his life insurance, as financially, he is worth more dead than alive. The dysfunctional families written by Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and others, indulge their addictions, snipe bitterly (and truthfully) at each other, and dream angrily about the chances they never had. All these works cast doubt on the reality of the American Dream. Letts references these works deliberately in his play. In August: Osage County, Beverly is positioned as the tragic hero, but during the Prologue he dies by suicide. The family is left without a hero, and Violet becomes the play’s antiheroine, reversing the gender and other expectations of who should inhabit that role. Like its predecessors, the play exposes flaws in society, such as the inadequacy of elder care, the devaluation of women as they age, the fraught medical system, and the overprescribing of opiates for pain.
