Tracy wins

“For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.”
 
Such is the criteria by which Tracy Letts was judged, and awarded a Pulitzer Prize for drama today for his play August: Osage County—which, if you didn’t hear, premiered last summer at 1650 N. Halsted.
 
Much has been argued regarding this play about the Oklahoma family with the skeletons in the closet and the drugs in every room. Some critics rushed to canonize it, while others laid down not-so-fast detractions. While this Pulitzer pick surely won’t be as controversial as last year’s—David Lindsay-Abaire’s modest but much-seen Rabbit Hole, about a wealthy couple mourning the loss of a child, bagged the prize when the Pulitzer committee overrode the three unfamiliar finalists that were submitted—it will stoke new “is it art?” debate.

I’m personally still a big fat sucker for A:OC, and damn happy to see it pick up the honor. The Pulitzers, like most of the nonprofit theater scene from which the last decade’s worth of winning plays were harvested, are usually a humorless affair. Tracy’s play, though, is raucously funny, mining countless laughs at the expense of middle-class rituals, mourning and otherwise. (After sitting through more tortured, proper plays about the grieving process in the last few seasons than can be remembered, it was a relief to see a writer knock it around like a piñata.)
 
It’s strange to me that this is the first Pulitzer winner since 1996’s Rent to portray drug addiction so candidly; pills, pot and booze are all in healthy supply in the Weston family home. How so many plays “dealing with American life” can skirt the realities of our prescription-pharmaceutical culture (and our nonprescription-narcotic culture) is beyond me, but most of A:OC’s characters have a drug of choice, and I think it’s a large but unacknowledged element of the play’s appeal. (Letts has been sober since his late 20s, giving him a vantage point for drugs many writers don’t share.)
 
Some of the play’s few naysayers have resented the critics and audiences who instantly proclaimed August: Osage a great American tragedy, when in fact it veers much closer to melodrama. I can sympathize with anyone who showed up to this show expecting neo-O’Neill—Lord knows nothing louses up a night at the theater like unfair expectations—but I feel sorry for anybody who wasn’t warned about the play’s true high-soap-opera nature in advance. It seems like these parties got gypped out of a good time.
 
And what it lacks in tragic stature, it makes up for in another rare natural resource: lines. You’d probably have to stretch back to Kushner’s Angels in America to find an American play that contributed phrases to the theatrical lexicon. But Letts’s uniquely prairie-minded rant about a malaise called “a case of the plains” is for the ages.
 
Congratulations to Letts and the Steppenwolf support staff who made his win possible—artistic director Martha Lavey, ace director Anna Shapiro, director of new play development Ed Sobel, Amy I'm-Running-Things-Now Morton and countless others in the Steppenwolf family.