A nuanced, courageous 'August: Osage County'

'This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: What a lament, if no one saw it go. Here today, gone tomorrow."

Those lines, offhandedly delivered in the middle of the second act of this immense play, are the pivotal point of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. Maybe all ambitious family dramas (dysfunctional goes without saying, from the Oresteia to Lear) use the drama of family as a way of talking about the drama of nation ("something is rotten in the state of Denmark").

It's worth noting that the play begins and ends with T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. And there's a Cheyenne Indian living in the attic. We're in Oklahoma, on The Plains - "a state of mind, like the blues." Everybody in Osage County's got The Plains.

The play, at the Arden, is immense not only in its ambitions but also in its length (3½ hours) and in its scope: generations of monsters, each vying for sympathy, understanding, and love, from the matriarch Violet (the excellent Carla Belver) to her granddaughter (Dylan Gelula). It's about surviving poverty, claw-hammer abuse, guilt, drugs, whiskey, infidelities, betrayals. We watch a family ferociously shred one another, but, surprisingly, although August: Osage County is a tragedy, it's a funny one.

In the first scene, we briefly meet the father of the family (David Howey) when he hires Johnna (Elena Araoz) as live-in help, informing her, and us, that he has been drunk for 50 years and that his wife is a rehab-repeating pill-popper.

When he mysteriously disappears, Violet calls her family home: her sister Mattie Fae (the irresistible Mary Martello), her husband Charlie (Paul L. Nolan) and their son, timid Little Charles (Charlie DelMarcelle in a beautifully rendered small role); long-suffering daughter Ivy (Corinna Burns); pragmatic daughter Karen (Kathryn Petersen) and Karen's smarmy fiance (Anthony Lawton).

All the resentments and heartbreaks are focused in her oldest daughter, Barbara (the passionate, ironical Grace Gonglewski), whose husband (Eric Hissom) is leaving her.

Eventually, the sheriff (Kevin Bergen) arrives with the predictably bad news, and all the consolatory fictions of family loyalty disintegrate. By the end, they all leave, emptying the house.

Terrence Nolen's direction is nuanced and courageous (though it could be argued that the play needs a proscenium stage, despite Nolen's wish to include the audience in the family mayhem). There are silent scenes when everybody is just going in and out of rooms or up and down stairs, and other scenes where everybody is talking at once. Just like home.

Through Oct. 30 at the Arden Theatre, 40 N. Second St. Tickets: $34-$45. 215-922-1122 or www.ardentheatre.org.

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