Sunday, March 7, 2010

Not So Fabulous Night at the Fox

Friday night we saw "August, Osage County" at the Fox. I knew nothing about the play, and I try not to read reviews because I so seldom agree with the critics anyway. I had heard that it had won lots of awards on Broadway though. The first thing we noticed is that the theater was not even half full, which is strange in and of itself. The lady who has the seats next to us asked if we knew that the production had two intermissions, and we admitted that we were not aware of this. She said her friend had seen the play and didn't get home until after midnight. By now I'm thinking that it better be a great play because I would be nodding off that much after my bedtime on a Friday night.

The set was awesome, as always, depicting the inside of a three story house. Sadly, that is all that was awesome about the production. The play begins with an obviously drunk man attempting to hire a native American woman to live in the house to help care for his mouth cancer stricken, drug addicted wife (played by the actress who was Roseanne Barr's mother on her show) so that he can continue to drink without having to worry about the little woman. His speech was so labored and hard to follow that I found myself silently cheering when he committed suicide early on in the play. The rest of the story consists of various relatives coming to the house for the funeral, all of whom are angry, bitter, and/or heavy drug or alcohol users. From pot smoking and sexual advances between a 30 something man and his fiances 14 year old niece to a relationship between what initially appeared to be first cousins but ended up to be half-siblings, the play trotted steadily downhill. There was a lot of screaming, dropping of the F bomb left and right and a small amount of humor dispersed.

I would have left at the first intermission (earlier were it not been for the fact that our seats are in the center of the row and we would have had to climb over people), but Jim wanted to tough it out. A good number of people did leave, including the two elderly couples behind us. I had to agree with the one man who said, "I come out at night to be entertained. This is not entertainment." I suppose I sadistically wanted to see if it could get any worse - it did. We pulled into our drive at midnight, and I was wondering if I could sum the play up in two words. I found that I only needed two letters - P U!

2 comments:

Mrs. Wryly said...

Sounds like a night of staring at your half-finished bathroom would have been more uplifting.

What was the point of the play? Slice of low life?

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