Witness a Dysfunctional Family in ‘Osage County’

The Weston family is fraught with problems’alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery and suicide’yet playwright Tracy Letts makes their agony seem surprisingly entertaining in the play ‘August: Osage County.’   This three-act tragicomedy, playing at the Ahmanson Theatre through October 18, is a sitcom and soap opera all in one.   Living in present-day Oklahoma, the three adult Weston daughters return home with their respective husbands, boyfriends and children because their alcoholic father has disappeared. The daughters are greeted by their pill-popping, self-pitying mother, who has mouth cancer, literally and figuratively. Resentments abound and family secrets are revealed.   Estelle Parsons, who won an Academy Award for her role in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ gives a towering performance as the family’s matriarch, Violet. She delivers her lines venomously, striking her victims with insults. Her character, who suffered from an abusive childhood, inflicts the misery in her own heart upon everyone around her.   She tells her daughter that she looks like a ‘magician’s assistant’ in her pantsuit. When the family sits down for dinner and the men take off their suit jackets, she scolds them by saying, ‘I thought we were having a family dinner, not a cockfight.’   Shannon Cochran, as the eldest daughter, Barbara, skillfully portrays a woman standing on the brink. Her character begins the play poised and ready to hold the family together. Slowly, her mother’s antagonism and husband’s infidelity wear her down.   Also notable is Libby George, who is downright hilarious as Aunt Mattie Fae. Her character banters with her husband, complaining that he is just sitting around drinking beers and watching baseball, while her brother-in-law is missing. When he points out that she’s being hypocritical because she’s drinking straight whiskey, she indignantly responds, ‘I am having a cocktail.’   Bitterly sad and fiercely funny, Cochran’s character sums up the play’s premise: ‘Thank God we can’t tell the future, or we’d never get out of bed.’   Tickets: (213) 972-4400 or www.centertheatregroup.org.