Letts talk

Photo: Fredrik Brauer

It’s with dukes up that one meets Tracy Letts. He is, after all, the actor who’s mastered an acerbic, casually cruel persona on Steppenwolf’s stage (The Pillowman, The Pain and the Itch). He’s a playwright of vivid violence (the paranoia thriller Bug, recently adapted for the screen, and the brutal trailer-trash noir comedy Killer Joe). He’s the blogger who posted on Steppenwolf’s website a ripping (and dead-on) tirade against bad audience behavior (of those who unwrap food during a show, he asked, “Can you really not wait until intermission to eat your fucking beer nuts?”). And he’s the guy who, by his own admission, once called a theater critic “a fucking horse’s cock” (we’ll come back to this).

But the man we encounter during a rehearsal break for his new play, August: Osage County, is courteous, affable and practically soft-edged—even as he threads his speech with “shit,” “fuck” and “goddamn.” Letts, 41 (but looking, say, 48), steps outside to smoke; after a three-year nicotine hiatus, he started up again when Amanda Plummer backed out of Bug days before its successful Off Broadway opening in 2004 (the film version, directed by The Exorcist’s William Friedkin, was released last month).

In person, as on stage, Letts speaks with such a precisely etched appreciation for words that if his salty language sounds coarse, then it is poetically so. Such contradictions permeate his work. Bug tracks a couple’s descent into homicidal madness, but ends with both declaring, “I love you.” His quiet Pulitzer finalist, Man from Nebraska, exposes the passive violence of a middle-aged man who abandons his wife, forcing her to care for his dying mom alone. And while the crustily charismatic Letts presents a stern face in this article’s photo, during the shoot he jokingly asked the photographer if he should look “like I’m angry getting my photo taken? I’m not. But like I am?”

In his fourth play, Letts gives that sinister-sentimental tension its most ambitious balancing act. Although he says August is 90 percent fiction, its “inciting incident” isn’t: When Letts was 10, his grandfather drowned himself; his bereaved grandmother spiraled into pill addiction. Playing the fictional counterpart of Letts’s granddad is Letts’s own father, Dennis, a retired college prof turned actor. (Letts’s mom, Billie, also left teaching for a second career; in 1998, Oprah’s Book Club selected her novel Where the Heart Is.) While August foregrounds dysfunctional-family issues of the darkest variety, it hums with affection. Intimating the theme that, as Letts says, “America as we know it, maybe it’s over,” August is a large three-act domestic play aspiring to the tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. “I think the American drama has gotten smaller and smaller, so the themes have gotten smaller…. You have to push the walls back a little bit.”

Growing up, Letts begrudged the walls of Durant, Oklahoma, a small town he found “pretty terrible…I doubt I’ll ever go back there again in my life.” (His folks now live in Tulsa.) An aspiring actor, teenage Letts moved to Dallas and then, two years later, Chicago. In 1997, he and his then–life partner, actor Holly Wantuch (she was in the original Killer Joe and Bug casts), moved to L.A. Four months later, Wantuch died of a congenital heart condition; both Letts and Wantuch were 32. “I loved her very much,” Letts says plainly. “She was a great lady, and I miss her.” Declining loopy screenwriting projects Hollywood execs offered him, Letts acted steadily—including an appearance in Seinfeld’s “Festivus” episode—but considered such gigs “not enough to feed the soul.” After performing in Steppenwolf’s Glengarry Glen Ross, he joined the ensemble in 2002. Letts and Amy Morton have since cultivated a captivating onstage dynamic—the attraction-repulsion of an old married couple—in shows from The Well-Appointed Room to the recent Betrayal.

Letts is also known for resenting theater critics, and he’s not afraid to make that distaste  public. “I think the profession is important,” Letts says; yet, “I think a lot of critics do their jobs really poorly.” In 1993, most local reviewers panned Killer Joe before it went on to New York and London success; one deemed Letts’s vision “contemptible, barbaric and flat-out evil.” When Letts later saw that critic at Bug’s premiere, “I called him a fucking horse’s cock.” Recalling the incident, he softens a bit: “If I had to see the fucking shit you [critics] have to see, I’d go crazy.”

He’s equally uncompromising with himself. “I’m a miserable alcoholic,” Letts says. “I’ve been thankfully sober for 13-plus years and hope I’ll make it to 14.” Of his ease in addressing his past drug and alcohol abuse, he says, “Well, shit, [with his signature wheezy, maniacal laugh] I got nothing to hide.” What is Letts private about? “Some of my oldest friends have never been to my apartment,” says Letts, who lives with actor Nicole Wiesner. “My home is private.”

Finishing up, we step outside so Letts can smoke. As his steely gaze narrows, his “take care” sounds both unquestionably genuine and as if he’s sending someone on his fucking way.

August: Osage County begins previews at Steppenwolf Theatre on June 28. See Theater.