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Some thoughts on Tracy Lett’s Pulitzer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I could not be more thrilled that Oklahoma-born Tracy Letts won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his scathing portrait of family dysfunction, “August: Osage County,” a play that ranks among the best of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Arthur Miller.
I knew he would.
And now for a little embarrassing confession:
When Letts played George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Alliance Theatre a few years back, I had no idea that he was this playwright with a cult following. (It was only a matter of time, fortunately, that Actor’s Express staged his “Bug” and “Killer Joe.”)
As it happened, I talked to Letts for a profile I was doing of Margo Skinner, who played Martha and passed away not long after her Atlanta engagement. Letts was generous in his praise of Skinner and only told me about his plays as a kind of afterthought.
He’s a big guy.
And now his Pulitzer must be bittersweet. His father — Dennis Letts, who played the hard-drinking patriarch in the original cast of “August” in Chicago and New York — died in February, after a battle with lung cancer.
“My dad was much more sure of this than me,” Letts told the Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones after he won the biggest American prize in dramatic literature. “He was telling me some months ago that this was a shoo-in. But I didn’t believe him.”
Susan Booth recently told me that all she could think about as she watched “August” was how she would cast it with a company of Atlanta actors. Letts wrote “August” for his colleagues at Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre.
Amy Morton, who directed the Alliance’s “Woolf,” is now starring in the Broadway run of “August.” If you can make it to New York, you need to see “August.”
It will blow you away.
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