Let's play Family Feud!
Tracy Letts' August: Osage County has arrived at the Benedum Center for a visit, accolades and awards (including the 2008 Pulitzer and Tony Awards) under its wide belt, and Estelle Parsons in the lead as wacko psycho Mama Violet Weston.
This is a woman who puts the "fun" in dysfunctional . . . provided your idea of fun is a knock-down, knock-out, pill and pot and sex and booze-fueled evening. Letts sets the family affair during the few days an extended family has gathered for a funeral, in which lies are exposed and secrets stripped bare with such force they bruise when they don't destroy.
Even Martha and George, Mary and James, Big Daddy and Brick, Joe and Kate would have some problems dealing with the heaping amounts of incest, suicide, mental illness, xenophobia, racism, drug abuse, self-hate, divorce, alcoholism and infidelity doled out by Violet and her bizarre, disaffected and doped family. Indeed the tone of the three-and-a-half-hour+ opus is set within the first few minutes: Violet's husband Beverly tells the Native American woman he's about to hire to care for his wife/house: "My wife takes pills and I drink. That's the bargain we've struck."
And you thought your family was bad.
August: Osage County is unflinching. There are no time outs. (There are two intermissions, during which, on opening night, scores of people opted out.) There is no time to catch your breath. The play bites, barks, barbs, stings and zings. It does its death dance on the frayed, exposed nerves of a family in the midst of a Great American Meltdown; it's universality lies in the fact that the Westons very well may be my family or yours, any of us who struggle with middle-class distortions and deceits.
It's a diatribe about addiction . . . to pills, booze, hate, lack of self-acceptance, fear.
It's about life. It's about loss. It's about love.
But truth be told: We've seen this type of chastening, cathartic multi-generational family soap opera tragic-comedy before. Think Albee, O'Neill, Williams, Miller. And we've seen it done better. August: Osage County never really lives up to its promise or hype. It's a potboiler whose core has been lifted from great playwrights and a few TV sitcoms. The plot is clumsy; we laugh uncomfortably, but there's none of the slicing emotional evisceration that somehow eventually redeems. There's no subtext; and Letts has trouble being subtle: The role of Native American servant Johnna is attached to the cast with no motivation other to be the one sane symbol of the household; the symbolism is so blatant the Blind Boys of Alabama could see this . . from Alabama!
It's clear that August: Osage County is one of those plays with great roles for great actors. Here, the play lies in the power of Estelle Parsons, she sizzles and scorches and slices through familial  façades with the compassion of a single-edge razor. Hers is a Violet who doesn't know how to shrink, who can only deal with her own vulnerability and personal damage by playing her most comfortable role---a mood-swinging, pill-popping, self-pitying magnificent merciless bitch. She's suffering from mouth cancer, but refuses to stop smoking. And none of the meds (not even the Xanax she takes "for fun") can numb her verbal venom. One of the first jolts to her husband: "Why don't you go f--- a f------ sow's ass?"
Big Bad Mama indeed. After all, this is a woman who, while in detox years ago, slipped drugs in by hiding them in her vagina.
No one in the cast matches Parsons in sheer power and force more than Shannon Cochran as eldest daughter Barbara. The women are dynamic as they play out the drama's central conflict until Barbara, finally accepting her failed marriage and bleak future, realizes that she has become her mother.
Letts pray. Welcome to the world of illusions. And disillusions.

August: Osage County runs through Sunday, April 11, 2010. Tickets: $55-$21. For more show and ticket information, call (412) 456-6666 or visit www.pgharts.org

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