Family Planning.('The Farnsworth Invention' and 'August: Osage County')(Theater review)

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 makes his often surreal situations feel very real: the secret is in the details. His derelict environments are a visual corollary to his characters' disturbing dialogue. In his first play, "Killer Joe" (1993), the story of a drug dealer who plots to have his mother killed for the insurance money, Letts describes the set this way: "Place: A trailer home on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. . . . The furnishings and decorations in the trailer are seedy and cheap; walls covered with ugly wood paneling; tattered, smoke-stained plastic shades covering the windows; kitchen filled with dirty, mismatched cups and utensils, many of them fast-food giveaways." In "Bug" (1996), a forty-four-year-old battered divorced waitress lives in a cramped motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. She washes her dirty dishes in the bathroom sink; her bed is a rumpled mess. By the end of the play, her room is as much of a bomb site as her emotional state.

Although the characters in Letts's latest play, "August: Osage County" (at the Imperial), may be better educated and more financially successful than his earlier characters, they still live in a heap of discomfort. The action takes place in what Letts describes as "a rambling country house outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma, sixty miles northwest of Tulsa. . . . At right, the kitchen. Country cooks have served their duty here, and amidst the clutter and grease, their ghosts perhaps still patrol. . . . The copper cookware hanging from the pot rack above the stove is cold and dusty, and the room is little more than storage space for that now." The house is a mess because its proprietors, Beverly Weston (Dennis Letts, the playwright's father) and his wife, Violet (Deanna Dunagan), are too busy drinking to notice the decay, let alone the decor. Still, Beverly--a stalled poet--is aware enough of his and Violet's decline to want to hire a maid to cook and help care for Violet, who is on a lot of medication, some of it prescribed: the poor thing has cancer of the mouth, as well as of the mind. She's constantly stoned, shouting at whoever will listen to her drama, which alternates between histrionics, dime-store readings of others, and waspish rejoinders. As a character, Violet is a meaner, more logical Collette Reardon, the hopeless pill-popper whom the former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Cheri Oteri played so brilliantly. Beverly hires Johnna (Kimberly Guerrero), a Native American woman, as much to be an audience for Violet's anger as to deal with the household chores.

That's the play's setup. In short order, a number of Paul Zindel-like "wacky" female characters begin to populate the house, including the Westons' adult daughters, Barbara, Ivy, and Karen (Amy Morton, Sally Murphy, and Mariann Mayberry). The girls show up when Beverly goes missing, not far ...