How fortunate for playwright Tracy Letts that he grew up in a bitter, vindictive and addiction-prone household. For his relatives became the inspiration for the Westons of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in his Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning August: Osage County, a darkly dramatic and often quite funny look at his wildly dysfunctional family. The three-and-a-half-hour, … [Read more...]
Dramaworks explores dysfunctional family in ‘August: Osage County’
Often compared to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is an exploration of yet another dysfunctional family, an epic play that also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It premiered in 2007 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where Letts is a company member and resident playwright. It quickly transferred to Broadway, … [Read more...]
‘Little Women’: A masterful, ravishing vision of young adulthood
I’m either the best or the worst person to review the latest adaptation of Little Women. I’ve not seen any of the previous seven adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age family saga — not even the George Cukor; heresy, I know — nor have I read the book. Which is to say that you won’t find any gripes regarding the latest iteration’s fealty to the source, or, … [Read more...]
‘Christine’ lingers in sensationalism it deplores
Sarasota newswoman Christine Chubbuck, who infamously shot herself on camera in 1974, may be a tragic footnote in the history of regional television. But in 2016, her paragraph is growing larger. In one of those weird confluences of cinematic synchronicity — like 2005’s pair of Truman Capote biofilms, or this year’s dueling French and Anglo-American takes on Florence Foster … [Read more...]
Amid sadism of ‘Wiener-Dog,’ Solondz finds meaning in mortality
Greta Gerwig and the pooch in Wiener-Dog. (Photo by Linda Callerus) Wiener-Dog may be Todd Solondz’s most Solondzian movie ever, and there is no image more Solondzian than his tracking shot of a seemingly endless train of dog diarrhea on a city street, scored to Debussy’s Clair de Lune. It’s simultaneously elegant and nasty, beautiful and repulsive, the cheekily contrapuntal … [Read more...]