August: So Gay County

There’s been plenty of post-hoopla debate about the literary nature of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County. Is it high tragedy? Base melodrama? Ethnic comedy for white people?

This YouTube reading, by internet bon vivants and New York divas-in-waiting Jeffery Self and Cole Escola, gives us an affectionate and telling insight into the play that hasn’t been much explored by critics: It’s chock full of the kind of strong female characters gay men crave and canonize. As these boys interpret it, Violet and Barbara Weston could easily be played by Joan Crawford and Agnes Moorehead.

This is further testament that Steppenwolf and August: Osage did what so few straight plays have done in the last few decades: permeate popular culture. (Self and Escola dedicate this clip to last season’s unfortunate American Idol nymph Danny Noriega. And they conclude by inviting Rosie O’Donnell to perform the third act with them. In Jeff Perry’s role.)

If this Saturday’s press opening of Letts’s Superior Donuts has you salivating in Pavlovian anticipation (it certainly does for us), try whetting your appetite here.