Broadway Revue 5

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Broadway Revue 5

Dysfunctional At Its Best in August: Osage County
If You Think Your Family Is Abnormal This Cast Will Have You Thinking Again!

By: Lisa Corleto, Junior, Deer Park, H.S., Deer Park, NY
TeenNewsNet Columnist

Dysfunction is supremely defined upon the stage through August:Osage County. The set resembles a house’s skeleton, cut in half. Or to be more specific, a life-sized doll house. It was extraordinarily elaborate, detailed, and realistic. I heard multiple audience members comment on how they could live inside of the set. Yes, I admit it... I like to imagine too and was one of those people.

The show starts as the lights went off and then focused on the far right of the stage, where you see an elderly man sitting, beginning to talk to someone.

This man was Beverly Weston, and he was talking to Johnna Monevata (the house-keeper he was hiring). He was drunk and rambling on about life, its dysfunction, and his dysfunctional family. Then a crazy old lady, mumbling nonsense, in a robe enters. It is Violet Weston, the pill popping matriarch. The stage blackens again, and this is where the plot begins.

    Violet is upset and distraught. Beverly has gone missing. Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae comes to her rescue, and soon following are her three daughters and their families. They soon discover that Beverly’s body was found in the lake. With everybody reunited, the suicide of Beverly, and the funeral, the family is turned upside down. Violets pill-popping addiction is discovered and confronted, the eldest daughter, Barbara, is getting a divorce and discovered her husbands like for teenagers, and her daughter, Jean, is a nymphomaniac drug-addict. Oh, it doesn't stop there! Then there’s the middle daughter, Ivy, who is in love with who she thought was her first cousin, Little Charles, but turns out to be her half brother.

    Is your head spinning? Well I told you this play takes Dysfunctional to new levels! Then the youngest daughter, Karen, is engaged to a seemingly normal guy, until the family finds him making out with Barbara’s daughter. Everyone begins to fight as all of these discoveries are made, and then there’s another question to be answered, who takes care of mom?

All of this unfolds in a darkly humorous, sarcastic way. It definitely deserved the Pulitzer Prize. It was hysterical and there was rarely a moment that I wasn’t laughing. The beginning, with Beverly’s monologue, was kind of boring and, in my head, I thought “Oh boy, I have to sit through 3 hours of this!” Then it progressively got funnier and funnier as the show went on. By the shows end, my side hurt from all the laughter.

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