Citation

Moldovan R. American, British and Canadian Studies 2022; 39(1): 121-142.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022)

DOI

10.2478/abcsj-2022-0020

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Tracy Letts is one of the best-known and most successful American playwrights of the 21st century, having won critical and popular acclaim both for his writing and acting. August: Osage County, probably his most celebrated play, premiered in 2007 and introduced the theater-going public to the dysfunctional Weston family, who reunite in a stifling, decaying Oklahoma mansion after the family patriarch's suicide. The Westons' familial crisis is manifested through addiction, violence, aggressiveness, adultery, rape and incest, each member having their own secrets and troubles. The present article aims, first, to examine how the characters deal with their personal crises and second, how the perceived sense of crisis and decline in the American society at large (both in a longer historical sense and in a sense contemporary to the events of the play) pushed family patriarch Beverly Weston to commit suicide out of a sense of profound hopelessness and disillusionment. Letts, by bringing familial crisis and conflict into the spotlight, shows how the disintegration of the Westons' family ties mirrors, to a significant extent, the crumbling of the American Dream. © 2022 Raluca Moldovan, published by Sciendo.

Language: en

Keywords

suicide; addiction; crisis; family conflict; intergenerational conflict; the American Dream