Family drama delivers multifaceted performances

“This is exactly like my family!” one woman exclaimed during the first of two intermissions.

Hopefully, she didn’t mean “exactly.” If she did, she should not — under any circumstances whatsoever — be smiling, and should instead be safely at therapy.

Such is the dysfunctional family at the heart of Tracy Letts’ Tony Award–winning drama August: Osage County, now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre until Oct. 18.

In the space of a little more than three hours — which amount to but to a few blinks of the eye — August: Osage County gets the audience to laugh loudly, cry quietly, gasp with shock, recoil with disgust and ultimately jump to its feet in rapturous, greatly deserved applause.

Once the play has you, it never lets go — it sweeps you up as if you are in the tempestuous tornado of high drama, which leaves massive wreckage in its proverbial wake. Nothing is safe. Everything is at stake.

The play is set in motion by the mysterious disappearance of Beverly Weston (Jon Devries), the alcoholic head of the Weston household. He leaves behind his old wife, Violet “I am a drug addict!” Weston (Estelle Parsons), and the recently hired help, an Indian woman named Johnna Monevata (DeLanna Studi).

Violet calls her daughter Ivy (Angelica Torn), who calls her sister Barbara (Shannon Cochran), who shows up with her husband Bill (Jeff Still) and 14-year-old daughter Jean (Emily Kinney). Pretty soon, the world’s most dysfunctional family is sweetly — well, not so sweetly — together again.

Complications that might figure one per season in a standard soap opera are all here, in one glorious super-soap of a show: addiction, suicide, adultery (more than once), rape, pedophilia and incest. At once hilarious and horrifying, the plights that befall this family should make most of us mighty thankful for our relative normalcy.

Except most of us can easily relate. Though our families may not be “exactly” like the Westons, somehow we know exactly what they’re going through. Requisite scenes such as the family dinner party — Violet letting off a delicious stream of invective insults against the world, Barbara losing her mind — speak to something universal. Therein lies the show’s genius: making extraordinary situations feel strangely ordinary.

Parsons’s Violet, a matriarchal monstrosity seemingly hell-bent on self-alienation, carries the entire show. She is scarily convincing, portraying a drug-addled, partially brain-damaged old woman to perfection. On her shoulders rests the fate of the Weston family, and it is all she can do not to buckle under the weight.

There to pick Violet up as she slams her right back down is Barbara — no doubt the strongest of the three Weston sisters. Cochran, whose deep voice lends a much-needed world-weariness to the difficult role, gives a performance to rival Parsons’s in effectiveness.

Her two sisters — Ivy and Karen (Amy Warren) — have slightly less meaty roles, but clearly make their presence known. Ivy, who falls in love with her first cousin Charles (a tenderly awkward Stephen Riley Key), imbues her character with a kind of otherness which at first feels forced but eventually makes perfect sense. Karen is the insufferable giggler of the group, acting determinedly optimistic and milking the role for some of the best laughs of the night. Demons prey on the minds of all the Weston sisters, and it is a testament to their acting that the audience sees those demons lurking behind every forced smile, every downward glance.

There isn’t a single weak link in the 13-member ensemble. A distinctive standout is Kinney’s pot-smoking, movie-obsessed Jean. A young actress, Kinney could easily have been overshadowed by her much more experienced castmates, yet she acts with remarkable maturity and never once suffers by comparison.

The sole criticism of the production is no fault of the actors. For some reason, the Ahmanson can’t ever seem to get a firm handle on sound, and the microphones are invariably one notch too quiet (Richard Woodbury did sound design for August, but other shows have suffered similarly). In a show like this, where every line is exquisitely written (Letts won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), missing even a single word can be a real tragedy.

Todd Rosenthal’s original scenic design — an elegantly multi-storied house, gorgeously lit by Ann G. Wrightson (who does wonderful work with transitional scenes complemented by Anna D. Shapiro’s clever direction) — haunts the mind a good while after the curtains close. It is claustrophobic, and it is confining. Violet Weston does not believe in air conditioning — as if it’s something, her husband observes, to disbelieve — and we can nearly feel what it might be like to step into that doorway and be greeted not by a gust of cool air but by an onslaught of unbearable heat.

By the show’s end, exhaustion sets in — emotional, mental and even physical. But it’s still not enough to keep the audience from giving this production — no doubt one of the best in recent years — a booming standing ovation.