August occasion

Photo: Sandro; Photo Illustration: Jamie Divecchio Ramsay

Since Tracy Letts’s epic, Oklahoma-set drama, August: Osage County, transferred from Steppenwolf to Broadway last fall, New York hasn’t been able to find enough awards to bestow upon the 42-year-old Chicagoan. The Pulitzer winner is up for yet more honors at this Sunday’s Tony Awards. Yet Letts’s success has been a tempered one: In February, his father, Dennis, who’d played August’s patriarch since its premiere, died of cancer. Next week, Letts’s new Steppenwolf play, Superior Donuts, begins previews.

Time Out Chicago: No pressure with the new play, right?
Tracy Letts: No. Hell no. Pressure’s off, man. Pressure’s off forever.

TOC: Really? Why is that?
Tracy Letts: Well, come on! [Laughs] I mean, what the fuck do I have to do? The pressure’s off!

TOC: So you’ve accomplished it all now.
Tracy Letts: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah, I’ve done it all. No. I enjoy the new play, and I think people are going to enjoy it, too, and that’s all I’m worried about. I’ve had a sense that it’s gonna get clobbered critically.

TOC: Why clobbered?
Tracy Letts: Just ’cause that’s the nature of things, right? You build something up and then you tear something down. Nothing I can do about it.

TOC: Were you able to take anything from the polarized reviews for August?
Tracy Letts: I read everything that’s written; I read every fucking word. But that’s the question: Can you read the reviews as helpful to the work? And I don’t know. By the time critics look at it, you’ve worked on it for so long that you say, “Well, I already thought of that. Give me something new to grow on.”

TOC: Did any of the criticisms ring true?
Tracy Letts: All the stuff that was positive. The positive stuff you sit there and go, “Yes, that’s absolutely what I intended to do.” And then the negative stuff you just say, “No, I can’t use that. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” I get mad for a day. I get my feelings hurt. I go, “Oh, that fucking John Simon,” or whoever it is. And then it goes away.

TOC: There’s been this question of whether August aspires to anything more than melodrama.
Tracy Letts: Those are the kinds of things that critics ask themselves, and they’re really not something I concern myself with too much. It is an audience response: Is this soap opera or is it something more than that?

TOC: But isn’t that also a writer’s question: Is my work more than just melodrama?
Tracy Letts: When Edward Albee presented the [New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award], he said, “I’ve read these things that compare you to Long Day’s Journey and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and to soap operas and sitcoms and all the rest,” and he said, “Don’t fall into that trap of letting people compare you to other stuff. Your thing is its own very specific thing.” And I appreciated that.

TOC: I’d like to ask about your father: He went to Broadway knowing he had a cancer diagnosis?
Tracy Letts: Yes. It was exceedingly difficult for everybody in my family. You’re making your Broadway debut while facing a diagnosis that is—well, devastating. But every fiber of my father’s being was telling him that this was the way to live. And he said to my family, “I am not going to New York to die. I’m going to New York to continue to live my life.”

TOC: Your new play looks at urban gentrification in Chicago’s North Side. How has the city changed since you moved here at age 20?
Tracy Letts: The city’s changed a lot. I’m not very expert in saying how it’s changed. Nor is my play about urban gentrification—Jesus. I keep reading this, and it sounds so fucking dry, you know? It’s about the people in a donut shop. Urban gentrification is an element of it. Maybe the city hasn’t changed so much as I have. When I moved here, I was a broke motherfucker working in storefront theaters and shit, lucky to get those jobs. Now I’m a hugely wealthy old fat man.

TOC: So the Broadway run has made you a pretty rich guy?
Tracy Letts: Well, by Chicago theater standards, yes. By the standards of the wealthy in this country, no, not really. I pick up the check at lunch. [Laughs] At lunch, mind you, not at dinner. Yes, it makes life more comfortable, but it’s awkward, isn’t it? A Chicago theater guy with money. It’s a little oxymoronic.

TOC: Anything we should expect from you at the Tonys this Sunday?
Tracy Letts: I’ve threatened to get a big cowboy hat and sunglasses like I was on the CMAs. I think that’s the expectation of the guy who writes August: Osage County.… The death of my father renders this stuff as fun and not much more than that.

Donuts begins previews June 19. Read our previous feature with Letts here, where he talks about his alcoholism, his acting career, and the time he called a critic "a horse's cock."