August: Osage County at The Players' Ring Theatre

The movie shows a bright and beautiful outside, but Letts’s play is set in a hot, dark, cramped house, where during one Oklahoma August, the large Weston family unexpectedly reunites. They gather to find out where, maybe even why, their head-of-house Beverly Weston, a lapsed poet, has chosen to vanish.

Given his pill-popping wife, Violet, and the rest of the family’s many shady secrets, the family homestead implodes with the weight of unwanted truths. It’s a family whose love has become irony, who all suffer from ‘the Plains,’ – a condition much like the Blues. Alan Huisman directs this major new play, which unflinchingly – and uproariously – exposes the dark side of the American family.

Sanford Farrier and Carol Davenport play Beverly and Violet Weston. The other players are, in their pairs: Peggi McCarthy and Cary Wendell, Helen Brock and John Tullgren, Laurie Torosian and Michael Stailey, Megan Davenport Karas and Joseph Bodnar. Samantha Bagdon plays granddaughter Jean, and Liz Locke plays Johnna, the housekeeper.