August: Osage County at the Alliance April 13 – May 8th

Lord have mercy!

If you love theatre you don’t want to miss seeing this ensemble of amazing actors in this Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play written by Tracy Letts and directed by Susan Booth. But if your guilty pleasures include Jerry Springer and any show with “Real Housewives” in the title then this is one play you must see! Billed as a dark comedy about a dysfunctional family it’s really more of an American tragedy on steroids.

The set is the kind of large open house that begs family gatherings with cliques assembling in various rooms to visit, share secrets and find respite from the action that takes place around the dining room table. The expansive tree in back alludes to a legacy of generational drama.

Act I commences with Mr. Beverly Weston (played by Del Hamilton) talking with a housekeeper he’s in the process of hiring about how he drinks and his wife, Violet (Brenda Bynum) takes pills. That’s just part of their marriage arrangement, he explains as if ruminating on how life had digressed. After the three adult daughters, a granddaughter, Violet’s sister, a nephew, a couple in-laws and a boyfriend join the action you realize that for this family booze and drugs were necessary! As the eldest daughter says to her own daughter, “Sometimes if we could see the future we would never get out of bed!”

Disfunctional? There is more drama in this two hours and forty-five minutes than in a whole season of Desperate Housewives! The laugh-out-loud barbs and sharp-tongued quips soon give way to multi-layered insanity and spewing venom under the guise of “being honest” then it develops into a full-fledged family fracas. (A couple times I thought the front row, mid-section audience members could be in physical danger!)

The audience laughs through bitterness, hate, lying, cheating, verbal abuse, secret-keeping, nonstop profanity, sex and violence.

Thirteen longtime members of the Atlanta theatre community make up this remarkable cast. Brenda Bynum (as matriarch Violet Weston) and Tess Mails Kincaid (as eldest daughter, Barbara Fordham) were both amazing and scary! Bynum played the pill-popping, hateful, vile mother with a kind of tiger-blood crazy that would make Charlie Sheen look tame. Kincaid’s portrays the daughter as an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. (Both women had to be exhausted after the performance!)

See this show before May 8^th and give thanks to God that you were not born into this family!

Parental advisory: Contains violence, drug use, smoking, profanity, sexuality and strong thematic elements.

Alliance Theatre