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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In much of his work, the forty-two-year-old Oklahoman playwright Tracy Letts beautifully captures the puritan streak in the American grain. Like the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah and the Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor, Letts is an artist who creates drama by pitting violence against our banal sense of decency. Having done that, he turns his sights on our godlessness, too, our lack of faith. Letts's strongest characters will have nothing to do with faith: where would it get them, except stuck--in hope? While their all-encompassing atheism can be blamed on a number of factors--poverty, alcoholism, a welfare system that barely knows they exist--Letts's characters, at least those in his early work, never flaunt their psychology to keep you interested. Instead, you are drawn in by the nearly somnambulistic logic of their destiny: they are born creeps, and you want to see how far they can go in mucking up the world. You don't so much identify with them as feel superior to them--at first. But once that feeling passes you find yourself succumbing to a certain uneasiness about your own life, brought to the surface by Letts's revelations.
In his comic and finely observed scripts, Letts...
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