Review: “August: Osage County” in Yountville
Excerpt from St. Helena Star ‘Review: “Oklahoma” in St. Helena and “August: Osage County” in Yountville’ by John Henry Martin, October 13, 2023
…And that sense of doom was on full display in another play being performed on the same weekend. Valley Players’ “August: Osage County” also takes place in the Sooner State, though around a century later.
I saw the Tony Award-winning production at the Curran in San Francisco in 2009. The thing I remember most about it was leaving the theater at 5:30 p.m. after a 2 p.m. curtain.
However, this production, directed by June Alane Reif, was so energetic and lively, the two intermissions caught me by surprise both times.
The play is set during a sweltering August in Osage County, Oklahoma. Beverly Weston, an alcoholic patriarch, has been missing for three days, while his wife remains high on a panoply of prescription medications. His three daughters and their spouses converge on the house. Eventually he is found dead, floating in a lake. The family must then grapple not just with the fallout from his death, but also the foibles and peccadilloes of their imperfect, desperate lives.
One of the reasons the play is a success is the complexity of its characters. The roles are as delicious and substantial as the chicken dinner Johnna (Anna Li) prepares for the mourning family. Violet’s granddaughter Jean (Kira Tavakoli) is a vegetarian because, she says, meat is “infused with fear” from when the animal is slaughtered. The roles in this play are like that: meaty like a chicken dinner, but infused with fear, and desperation, and psychic injury, which these actors devour with histrionic pleasure.
Randi Storm is made for the role of the insane, drug-addled matriarch Violet Weston. Her high-pitched raspy voice broke at every rant and every rave. I hope for her children’s sake that she isn’t drawing any of this vitriol from real life. Though if she is, this performance would be the reward for whatever havoc she’s wreaked on her own family. This is the role of a lifetime for her, and you could tell she knew it.
Valley Players’ regular Rhonda Bowen is the sensible oldest sister, Barbara Fordham. She embodied all the middle-aged angst of a modern woman with a failing marriage to Bill Fordham, played by a befuddled Richard Pallaziol. (Befuddlement is something Pallaziol does well, and often.) She and Bill are separated because he has cheated on her with a younger woman — one of his students. There is a scene where Bill abandons Barbara and Bowen is painfully vulnerable, channeling the confusion of love, bruised pride and indignation of a jilted wife.
Another Valley Players regular is Christina Julian, who plays Karen Weston as a hilariously desperate woman yearning for a man of her own. She is chirpy and cheerful at the beginning, but then goes apoplectic on her niece Jean when her fiancé Steve (a smarmy Craig Rekdahl) takes advantage of the 15-year-old girl. Her ire is wonderfully oblivious given Steve’s three previous wives who obviously divorced him for his infidelity.
Nancy Heine was also weirdly authentic as Mattie Fae Aiken, Violet’s sister. She was judgmental and condescending and authoritarian, railroading her husband Charlie (Dan Monez, who seemed to play himself) into agreeing with her. Heine was every churchgoing, busybody woman in her seventies I have ever met. She is terribly mean to her unconfident son, Little Charles, played to nearly paralyzed insecurity by Michael Hunter. She is utterly believable and I hope to God that she isn’t playing herself.
The most important role in the play, however, is that of Johnna Monevata, the Cheyenne cook and housekeeper that is hired at the beginning of the play. Anna Li is calm and collected and betrays no judgment of her inebriated employers. She observes the chaos from outside the biological bonds that unite the other characters. She was perfectly serene and demure, the eye of the emotional storm on stage.
The show was a profoundly satisfying night of theater. My only complaint is that it took place not in a theater, but in the multipurpose room of the Yountville Community Center. The chairs in the audience aren’t raked like they were at the Lincoln Theater, so for most of the performance I had to peek around the copious auburn tresses of the person in front of me. They would do better to scatter the chairs to make more lines of sight, not put them in militaristic rows.
That wouldn’t be a problem if the show weren’t worth seeing. But this one is.
Showtimes are March 10, 11, 17, 18, 24 & 25 at 7 pm, March 12, 19 & 26 at 2 pm at the Yountville Community Center.
Intended for mature audiences.
Tickets can be pre-purchased online or by calling 707-948-6273 for $25.
Tickets can purchased at the door beginning one hour before showtime for $28.