August: Osage County

Although Beverly only appears in the prologue, which means that he doesn’t show up in the body of the play at all, his presence as the family patriarch—Violet’s husband and the father of Ivy, Karen, Barbara, and (as is revealed later) Little Charles—is felt throughout the following acts, and his actions are the catalyst that sets the play in motion. Beverly grew up poor, even experiencing homelessness, and pulled himself up to briefly become a celebrated academic and writer. His collection of poetry, Meadowlark, marked him as a promising talent in the 1960s, but ultimately, it became the spot where his career peaked.

At the start of the play, Beverly is an alcoholic, using whiskey to blur his sense of disappointment and imprisonment in the large, suffocating Osage Plains house that he shares with his wife, Violet. Neither Beverly nor Violet has any interest in overcoming their addictions. Although the first scene makes Beverly’s alcoholism seem less debilitating than Violet’s opioid addiction, Violet later remembers when Beverly soiled himself while intoxicated at an academic function.

Nearly 40 years earlier, Beverly had an affair with Mattie Fae, his wife’s sister, and fathered Little Charles although neither Beverly nor Mattie Fae ever acknowledged his paternity. Violet, who never let on that she knew about Beverly’s indiscretion, believed that his guilt kept him married to her for the next several decades. When Beverly’s body is recovered and he is determined to have died by suicide, Bill can’t understand how someone could jump into a lake and “choose not to swim” (53). Beverly’s suicide isn’t a bold, dramatic act so much as a letting go. He gives Violet a chance to throw him a lifeline, suggesting that he wasn’t as decisive as such a final act makes him seem.

Johnna is a young Cheyenne woman whom Beverly hires as a live-in caretaker and housekeeper, ostensibly for both himself and his wife, but ultimately only for Violet. She is a representation of the Indigenous nations that have been displaced, first from their homelands and again by westward expansion into the land where the Weston house sits. Beverly invites her to treat the house as her home, saying, “If you’re going to live here, I want you to live here” (15), but Johnna is an outsider, relegated to a room in the attic that is likely the hottest room in a sweltering house. The family responds to her presence with varying levels of discomfort, from Violet’s unabashed racism to Barbara’s awkward white guilt. She is a witness to their dysfunction as it is compounded by the stress of a family crisis.

Johnna is quiet and stoic, but she is not written as a “noble savage” stereotype. She maintains a sense of distance throughout the play despite the resonance of her experience of recently losing her father with the play’s events. She needs the work and has been struggling to stay employed after her career path was disrupted when her father’s death forced her to drop out of community college after a year of studying to become a nurse.

Notably, Johnna chooses not to translate her last name from her Indigenous language into English, unlike her father who went by Youngbird. This suggests a refusal to concern herself with the legibility of her culture under the white gaze. Johnna sidesteps attempts to draw her into family conflict, which makes the moment she intervenes in Steve’s sexual assault on Jean particularly significant. It demonstrates that Johnna isn’t apathetic. She simply needs the job badly enough to endure poor conditions and verbal abuse without complaint.

Mattie Fae is Violet’s younger sister, who realizes at the start of Act I that she hasn’t been to Violet’s house in at least two years. Although Mattie Fae only lives about an hour and a half from Violet, her avoidance seems to be by design. Even with Beverly missing, Mattie Fae arrived armed with an excuse to deflect expectations to stay the night, and at first it isn’t clear why. Mattie Fae and Violet were raised by a horrifically abusive mother, and Violet credits Mattie Fae for shielding her from their mother’s attack with a claw hammer. Mattie Fae is funny and often uncouth, and she doesn’t buy into Violet’s claims about women declining as they age, insisting that she is “still very sexy” (66).

She has more humor than warmth, but her cruelty is primarily aimed at her son, Little Charles. Her unrelenting vitriol toward Little Charles, both behind his back and to his face, suggests that she isn’t just disappointed in him but disgusted. Before she leaves her sister’s house, Mattie Fae reveals to Barbara that Little Charles is the result of an affair she had with Beverly, which explains both her reluctance to stay in her sister’s house, especially during a time that is centered on Beverly, and her revulsion toward her son. Mattie Fae’s confession, along with her dumping of the responsibility for the secret on Barbara, is a move that swiftly and callously crushes her son and Ivy’s happiness in a relationship that might be socially unacceptable but is a source of emotional stability for the people involved.

Charlie, who is Mattie Fae’s husband, is a kind-hearted, easy-going man, who deals with the Weston family conflict by toggling between creating distractions to break the tension and remaining on the sidelines with his beer. He expresses his grief for Beverly, who he sincerely cared about, and he seems to be one of the few characters with healthy emotions and coping mechanisms. He loves Little Charles, his (ironic) namesake, and shows him the warmth, support, and understanding that Mattie Fae won’t. Charlie doesn’t seem to know the not-so-secret circumstances of Little Charles’s paternity, but it would certainly be in character for him to continue parenting the son he loves and pretend to be unaware.

Although Charlie is very different from Beverly in many ways, such as his disinterest in academia, the two men share one key similarity: they are married to complicated and difficult women. If Mattie Fae seems milder than Violet at first, her treatment of Little Charles suggests that she is only less intoxicated. But while Beverly became trapped in his house and marriage, Charlie asserts that he wouldn’t trade the nearly 40 years he’s spent married to Mattie Fae. However, he refuses to tolerate her meanness toward Little Charles and threatens to divorce her if she doesn’t stop. Charlie stands up to his wife because he has no intention of becoming trapped, but at the play’s end, it remains unclear if his resolve will change anything.

The oldest of the three Weston sisters and proclaimed by Ivy to be Violet’s favorite, Barbara drops everything to travel from Colorado with her daughter and complicated marriage in tow when her father goes missing. Much of Barbara’s life is spiraling out of control. Her husband had an affair with a student, and yet he retains the power to decide whether the marriage is over. Her daughter, Jean, is smoking cigarettes and weed, and the decision to allow her to do so openly seems like an attempt to retain the appearance of control. Barbara can’t control her father’s fate, and she has no choice but to endure the traumatic experience of identifying his decomposing body as her mother escapes responsibility by slipping into opioid-fueled incoherence.

When Barbara moved to Colorado with Bill, she gave up her own academic career for his, which she rationalizes by asserting that she had no real potential. Now that she is in her forties and losing her marriage, Barbara is rudderless and starts to get sucked into the quagmire of her mother and her airless childhood home. She decides to usurp her mother as the Weston matriarch by wrestling Violet to the ground during a family dinner under the pretense of enforcing Violet’s sobriety. When Barbara slaps Jean, she must face that she has inherited a family legacy of generational trauma that tends to manifest itself in emotional and physical abusiveness. For a while, Barbara gives up her attempts to distance herself from her family and moves in with her mother. But with the discovery that Violet knew where Beverly was staying and chose to let him kill himself as a power move, Barbara comes to her senses and escapes.

Bill, who is a college professor, is married to Barbara and is having an illicit affair with a much younger student. He has accompanied Barbara to help cover up the separation and avoid her family’s scrutiny. It seems as if the decision to allow Jean to smoke openly is primarily championed by Bill, whom Barbara accuses of thinking it makes their daughter cool, forcing Barbara to be labeled the harsh, unreasonable parent. This is particularly pertinent in the face of inevitable custody negotiations, in which a judge will likely give weight to Jean’s wishes. When Bill sees an opportunity to leave and take Jean with him, he seizes it instead of giving Barbara a chance to make amends. Bill also doesn’t seem to notice any irony in his daughter being preyed upon by an older man as he himself is preying on a younger woman over whom he holds a position of power.

Like many 14-year-old girls, Jean believes that she is essentially an adult, an idea that is bolstered by her parents’ permissiveness about age-inappropriate habits like smoking cigarettes and weed. Although the play is in large part about the functional and dysfunctional relationships between parents (particularly mothers) and their children, Jean is the only actual child in the family. She has recently undergone puberty, and her sense of privacy and bodily autonomy are violated from the moment she walks through the door as Mattie Fae comments brashly about her breasts. To Johnna, Jean complains that her mother is “on hymen patrol” (43). At dinner, her vegetarianism becomes the butt of the joke that Charlie makes to break the tension, but no one steps in to protect her when Violet vaguely threatens her with physical violence.

Throughout the play, her parents are too preoccupied with their failing marriage to worry about protecting Jean, who knows more than she should about her father’s affair with a student. She comments that all of the men in her father’s department are just dreaming about doing the same, demonstrating that she has developed a skewed sense of sexuality and consent. Jean is precocious and intelligent, and she tries to appear detached and mature, offering to identify Beverly’s body, which should not be a child’s responsibility. While everyone, including Jean’s parents, are focused on Violet’s abusive raving, Jean is groomed and sexually assaulted by Steve. She laughs off his graphically sexual “jokes” about her body because she appreciates being treated like an adult. But when he starts to assault her, it’s very apparent that she is a child who finds herself frozen and unable to shout or fight.

Ivy is the middle of Violet and Beverly’s three daughters, and at 44, she is finally poised to take control of her own life and escape from her mother. Her two sisters moved away, leaving Ivy to take on the role of caretaker, which perhaps Beverly intended to release her from by hiring Johnna. Violet has kept her trapped by destroying her confidence, inflicting verbal abuse and criticism of every choice that Ivy makes, including insulting her for her inability to find a man while scoffing at the last man she dated. Ivy is sensitive, anxious, and unconventional. She wore a suit to her father’s funeral, appalling her mother, but she refuses to give in when Violet chases her around the house with a black dress to change into.

Ivy doesn’t confide easily in others and didn’t even tell her sisters that she had cervical cancer that led to a hysterectomy two years ago. She articulates the impolite truth that she doesn’t feel close to Barbara or Karen, who have avoided coming home to visit for a long time. Ivy has unexpectedly found a kindred spirit in Little Charles, her (supposed) cousin, who cared for her while she was healing from her hysterectomy. They fell in love, which Ivy has kept hidden due to the taboo of forming romances with blood relatives. Ivy asserts that their relationship is rare and special, which is demonstrated when they have a moment alone together. They are planning to run away to New York and start fresh where no one knows who they are, and Ivy insists that they will still go even after she learns that Little Charles is her half-brother. Violet is certain that her cruel revelation will keep Ivy back, just as it always has, but the future is left open-ended.

Little Charles is Mattie’s Fae’s 37-year-old son whom she has led, along with the rest of the family, to believe was fathered by her husband, Charlie. His personality is similar to Ivy’s in that he is sweet and sensitive but nervous and insecure. This is most likely because Little Charles, like Ivy, has been subjected to his mother’s cruel verbal abuse for his entire life. Mattie Fae tears him down relentlessly for being single, unemployed, unable to drive, and generally disappointing. Little Charles doesn’t appear until Act II, having ridden the bus there after his latest screw-up, which was sleeping through his grandfather’s funeral. He then leaves his mother’s casserole in a hot car before bringing it inside and accidentally dropping it.

Mattie Fae’s maliciousness is tempered with Charlie’s reassurance and love, but he has finally found his soulmate in Ivy, who is unfortunately also (he thinks) his cousin. Ivy brings out the best in Little Charles. He writes songs for her, and she treats him like an adult. They take care of each other and give each other the kindness that has been lacking in their familial relationships. But Mattie Fae (and later Violet) reveals that Little Charles’s real father is Beverly, making him Ivy’s half-brother. This knowledge of Mattie Fae’s transgressions of nearly 40 years ago threatens to tear apart the only healthy and loving relationship in the play.

The youngest Weston sister, Karen doesn’t arrive from Miami until the second act, after the crisis of Beverly’s disappearance has concluded. Karen has been dreaming about her future husband since she was a child. She has had several relationships with uncaring and abusive men who caused her to internalize the blame for their bad behavior. She dabbled in questionable spiritual communities, including Scientology, but never found what she was looking for. Now, Karen is engaged to Steve, whom she claims has finally made her happy for the first time in her life. Karen avoided seeing her family because she didn’t want them to know how unhappy she was, and she is now invested in soliciting her family’s approval of Steve. Because of this, Karen finally wants to become close with her sisters.

Unlike Barbara and Ivy, Karen has no intention of sharing the responsibility for making sure that Violet has a caretaker, nor of doing anything to take the burden off Ivy. While Barbara expresses that she is happy for her sister, Violet quickly dashes any hope that she will grant her approval. She insults Karen for bringing a date to her father’s funeral and states that she has no intention of attending Karen’s wedding. She also points out that Karen is aging, which Violet believes means a woman becomes ugly. When Karen discovers that Steve was grooming her teenaged niece right under her nose, she makes an immediate decision to forgive him, and they hurriedly pack and leave in the middle of the night. Karen would rather turn a blind eye to Steve’s sexual advances toward a child than start over when she has internalized the idea that she is becoming unattractive.

Steve, Karen’s fiancé, accompanies her to Oklahoma for her father’s funeral, supposedly having cancelled an important meeting to be there. Karen sings his praises before he ever appears onstage, but the audience’s introduction to Steve is his immediate attempts to ingratiate himself with Jean by impressing her with his knowledge of the old film she’s watching. Steve approaches her when she is alone, and there is no question of his intentions as he offers her weed, makes sexual jokes about her, and gives her a predatory sniff. When Karen is around, Steve plays the loving fiancé, but he takes any chance he can to befriend Jean and convince her to trust him, despite his continual sexual remarks. Once Steve manages to get Jean alone in the middle of the night, he smokes weed with her to the point that she is higher than she expected. He starts to force himself on her, and only a frying pan to the head stops him. Steve leaves with Karen and presumably avoids any consequences, repeating the Weston family pattern of men cheating on their wives with younger women.