August: Osage County

“My wife. Violet. Violet, my wife, doesn’t believe she needs treatment for her habit. She has been down that road once before, and came out clean as a whistle…then chose for herself this reality instead.”

Beverly is stating that Violet chooses her addiction after working to achieve sobriety and then deciding of her own volition that being high is better. Certainly, addiction isn’t chosen, and sobriety doesn’t equal a cure from addiction, as the cravings may not ever go away. Violet has no interest in attempting sobriety again, which suggests such a deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness in her life that she isn’t willing to face it sober. Given Beverly’s alcoholism, it seems as if they both have reached that conclusion.

“Honey, you have to be smart to be complicated.”

Mattie Fae is responding to Charlie’s comparison of Beverly to their son, Little Charles. When he calls her out for saying that their son is unintelligent, Mattie Fae staunchly reaffirms her statement. Throughout the play, Mattie Fae will berate Little Charles at every opportunity, usually to his face and in front of the family. In actuality, Little Charles is complicated. He is timid and accident-prone, but there is much more to him than meets the eye. This comment demonstrates that Mattie Fae doesn’t see her son as a full, complex human being, which explains how she can hurl so much soul-crushing abuse at him.

“All women need makeup. Don’t let anybody tell you different. The only woman who was pretty enough to go without makeup was Elizabeth Taylor and she wore a ton. Sit up straight.”

Violet is trying to impress upon Ivy that she needs to dress up and wear makeup if she wants to be pretty and attract a man. She is relentlessly critical of Ivy, which is perhaps her deliberate effort to destroy Ivy’s confidence and keep her from leaving, which seems to have worked. According to Violet’s claims about women, women have a very short window to be beautiful before they start declining with age. And apparently, even then, beauty requires completely covering one’s face.

“The jokers who settled this place. The Germans and the Dutch and the Irish. Who was the asshole who saw this flat hot nothing and planted his flag? I mean, we fucked the Indians for this? […] This is the Plains: a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the Blues.”

Barbara’s first observation upon arriving and taking in the landscape of her hometown is the oppressive heat. There won’t be any relief from the suffocating temperature of Oklahoma in August, as Violet doesn’t believe in air conditioning. Barbara has avoided coming home to visit due to the deep spiritual heaviness that she feels immediately upon arriving, but her father’s disappearance created an obligation she couldn’t avoid. Although Bill responds to her comments with jokes, the essential dread of the place will seep into Bill and Jean as well.

“BARBARA. Who’s Johnna?

VIOLET. She’s the Indian who lives in my attic.”

Violet’s often racist language about Johnna throughout the play makes it clear that she views Johnna as an interloper. By referring to Johnna as the “Indian” in the attic, Violet makes her seem like an uninvited squatter rather than the hired caretaker that she is. Johnna is remarkably stoic throughout the play and in the face of Violet’s nastiness. Notably, Violet doesn’t try to fire Johnna. Beverly hired her, but he is gone. This suggests that Violet understands on some level that Johnna’s presence is necessary. Ultimately, only Johnna is left once Violet drives her entire family away.

“Let’s just call the dinosaurs ‘Native Americans’ while we’re at it.”

Violet complains about Johnna’s presence in the house, stating that she doesn’t know what to say to an “Indian,” and Barbara corrects her outdated use of the word. The debate over this term comes up later in the play during the volatile family dinner. Violet mocks the idea of using newer language to be less offensive, but she seems to also be annoyed at the notion that there is a group of people with a prior claim to the land she owns.

“He’s fucking one of his students which is pretty uncool, if you ask me. Some people would think that’s cool, like those dicks who teach with him in the Humanities Department because they’re all fucking their students or wish they were fucking their students. ‘Lo-liii-ta.’ I mean, I don’t care and all, he can fuck whoever he wants and he’s a teacher and that’s who teachers meet, students. He was just a turd the way he went about it and didn’t give Mom a chance to respond or anything.”

Jean opens up to Johnna about her father’s affair, although she doesn’t quite have a grasp on what bothers her about his actions. She recognizes that it’s a problem that there are much older men who are living out their Lolita fantasies with their students, but she doesn’t fully realize the implications of the power dynamic between professor and student, which would mean acknowledging that her father’s behavior is predatory.

“When a Cheyenne baby is born, their umbilical cord is dried and sewn into this pouch. Turtles for girls, lizards for boys. And we wear it for the rest of our lives. […] Because if we lose it, our souls belong nowhere and after we die our souls will walk the Earth looking for where we belong.”

Cheyenne tradition ties the idea of home to the physical body. Therefore, no matter how many times they are relocated, they are never homeless. Even with Johnna’s parents now dead, her umbilical cord ties her to her roots. For the Weston family, the upheaval of divorce, death, moving to New York, and general change has made them all feel the threat of rootlessness.

“BARBARA. You do understand that it hurts, to go from sharing a bed with you for twenty-three years to sleeping by myself.

BILL. I’m here, now.

BARBARA. Men always say shit like that, as if the past and the future don’t exist.”

Barbara is in the odd and stressful position of trying to keep up the appearance of a cohesive family while in the midst of a separation and likely divorce. Because of this, they are sharing a sofa bed although Bill has already left their marital bed at home. Bill’s statement is valiant sounding but meaningless. His presence isn’t an attempt to mend their marriage. He cheated on Barbara and left her, and once the present situation is resolved, Bill has no intention of trying to work on his marriage.

“Oh Christ. How does a person jump into the water…and choose not to swim?”

Bill is trying to understand the passivity of Beverly’s method of death by suicide. It seems to be against human nature to not swim, as if survival instincts would force him to fight for his life. But the same might be said for Bill’s choice not to fight for his marriage, or Violet’s choice not to fight her addiction.

“Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don’t care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just…survive. Outlive me, please.”

Faced with the horror of identifying her father’s body, Barbara expresses to Jean the deep sentiment beneath her (sometimes over-zealous, according to Jean) attempts to keep Jean safe from both bodily and emotional harm. Facing her father’s death and being forced to stare it in the face is a reminder of mortality, and she sees that life is tenuous. What seems like controlling behavior to Jean is based on Barbara’s underlying terror of losing her.

“KAREN. I don’t give a care about the past anymore, the mistakes I made, the way I thought, I won’t go back there. And I’ve realized you can’t plan the future, because as soon as you do, you know something happens, some terrible thing happens—

BARBARA. Like your father drowning himself.”

Karen is introduced through a long-winded monologue in which she tells Barbara about herself, as if their father’s suicide is an interruption in her life instead of a massive event that changes all their lives. Karen never elaborates about the past choices and mistakes that she has chosen to forget and embrace her life with Steve, but she demonstrates later that she intends to stay on course with her plan no matter what happens or has happened. Even Steve molesting her niece isn’t enough for her to let go of the path she has chosen.

“BILL. Our kid is just trying to deal with this goddamn madhouse you’ve dragged her into.

BARBARA. This madhouse is my home.

BILL. Think about that statement for a second, why don’t you?”

Barbara has accused Bill of becoming an absentee father while giving his attention to his affair with his student. Bill blames their current upheaval on Barbara for bringing Jean into Violet’s house. To Barbara, no matter how unstable the environment, it is her home, and she has a blood-based obligation to return to it. Jean has the same blood and even tries to volunteer to identify Beverly’s body. Barbara realizes at the end of the play that she has to cut ties, regardless of blood, for the sake of her own survival. Bill has already decided that his bond to his family can be cut at his will.

“That today’s the send-off Bev should’ve got if he died around 1974. Lots of talk about poetry, teaching. Well he hadn’t written any poetry to speak of since ’65 and he never liked teaching worth a damn. Nobody talked about the good stud. Man was a world class alcoholic, more’n fifty years. Nobody told the story about that night he got wrangled into giving a talk at a TU alumni dinner…(Laughs) Drank a whole bottle of rum, Ron Bocoy White Rum—I don’t know why I remember that—and got up to give this talk…and he fouled himself!”

Here, Violet describes the dissonance between the Beverly she knew and the Beverly that is sanitized and celebrated at his funeral. She complains about the closed casket although the state of Beverly’s body made it obviously impossible to display. In telling this story, Violet is exposing some of the ugliness of her husband, pointing out that he didn’t do anything eulogy-worthy in 30 years.

“This woman came to my rescue when one of my dear mother’s many gentlemen friends was attacking me with a claw hammer! This woman has dents in her skull from hammer blows! You think you been attacked?! What do you know about life on these Plains? What do you know about hard times?”

Violet identifies deeply with the Plains, having asserted earlier that Beverly would never have left their home either, even though he had offers after publishing his book. Violet, Beverly, and Mattie Fae all had hard upbringings in poverty and abuse, and Violet believes that the pain of her past gives her a level of credibility that her own daughters can’t claim, as Violet doesn’t recognize her verbal abuse as real abuse. Violet’s identification with the Plains is tied to her refusal to use the phrase “Native American.”

“I can’t perpetuate these myths of family or sisterhood anymore. We’re all just people, some of us accidentally connected by genetics, a random selection of cells. Nothing more.”

Ivy is attempting to separate herself from her family and downplay the significance of being related by blood. The three sisters haven’t been close in years, becoming disconnected through distance and neglecting their relationships. Karen claims that she wants to foster a closer bond with her sisters. Undoubtedly, Ivy’s interest in minimizing familial relationships is to justify her relationship with her cousin. But when Ivy discovers that Little Charles is her half-brother, she is horrified, suggesting that Ivy does feel the obligation and pull of familial blood, and a half-brother is crossing a line that she was willing to ignore with a cousin.

“Oh…nothing to be embarrassed about. Secret crushes, secret schemes…province of teenage girls. I can’t imagine anything more delicate, or bittersweet. Some part of you girls I just always identified with…no matter how old you get, a woman’s hard-pressed to throw off that part of herself.”

Violet has a preoccupation with youth, and she romanticizes the teenage years in which a woman has—according to her assertions—yet to grow old and ugly. Perhaps her lingering identification with her three daughters as teenagers feeds into Violet’s badgering them in various ways for how they’ve grown older. The real teenager in the house is a reminder that those years are much more complicated and less romantic than Violet remembers.

“I know how this goes: once all the talking’s through, people go back to their own nonsense. I know that. So don’t you worry about me. I’ll manage. I get by.”

Violet is sober in this interaction with Barbara after her uncharacteristically warm conversation with all three of her daughters. Now that Violet is civil, Barbara feels guilty about fighting and tackling her at dinner, as if that version of Violet might have been a mirage. She expresses concern for Violet’s well-being going forward. The edge of bitterness that creeps into Violet’s statement is evidence that she isn’t a different person while high. She just has less control over herself.

“I’m white and over thirty. I don’t get in trouble.”

Steve says this to Jean just before turning off the lights and sexually assaulting her. Jean, who is very high, was trying to protest weakly against his advances. His statement, as well as his obviously practiced method of preying on girls, suggests that this is not the first time he’s done this, and it won’t be the last. As a white middle-class man over 30, his privilege allows him to slip past any consequences. Johnna, who isn’t white, delivers the blow with a frying pan that supersedes Steve’s race and privilege.

“You better find out from Jean just exactly what went on in there before you start pointing fingers, that’s all I’m saying. ’Cause I doubt Jean’s exactly blameless in all this. And I’m not blaming her. Just because I said she’s not blameless, that doesn’t mean I’ve blamed her. I’m saying she might share in the responsibility. You understand me? I know Steve should know better than Jean, that she’s only fourteen. My point is, it’s not cut and dried, black and white, good and bad. It lives where everything lives: somewhere in the middle. Where everything lives, where all the rest of us live, everyone but you.”

Karen desperately justifies Steve’s actions as she packs and dresses quickly to leave with him, hoping to save him from any legal consequences. Of course, the audience saw how Steve preyed on Jean, and there is no question of his guilt and responsibility. Karen has found a man who she is proud to be with, and she is willing to minimize and suppress any event that says otherwise. The quickness with which she decides to pretend that infidelity and pedophilia didn’t happen implies that Karen would rather live in denial than face the truth.

“I’ve forgotten what I look like.”

Barbara says this when she pulls away from kissing Sheriff Gilbeau. Earlier in the play, Barbara tells Jean a sweet story about how she and Gilbeau spent their prom night together, making the most of a terrible situation and spending the night drinking beer and kissing. For a moment, kissing him again brings her back to that moment, when she was young and beautiful and had her whole life in front of her. Although Gilbeau obviously finds her attractive as she is, Barbara is taken aback when she remembers that she is 46 and no longer that teenage girl.

“Are we breaking shit? (Barbara takes a vase from the sideboard, smashes it.) ’Cause I can break shit—(Violet throws her plate, smashes it.) See, we can all break shit.”

Barbara is simultaneously expressing her breakdown and trying to stop Ivy from telling Violet that she is romantically involved with Little Charles. Barbara has sunken into a routine in which she is becoming like her mother, perhaps because they’ve both lost husbands and had their daughters leave them. They are breaking things because they have no more coping mechanisms left but violence.

“BARBARA. It’s the pills talking.

VIOLET. Pills can’t talk.”

Violet has just casually dropped the revelation that Little Charles is Beverly’s son to Ivy and Barbara. Barbara is still trying desperately to protect Ivy from this information. Violet’s response suggests that it is not the pills that make her cruel, outspoken, and tactless; she is like that anyway. The pills only lower her inhibitions. Every cruel thing she has said while high is what she believes to be true.