Breakfast with Tracy Letts
After monster hit 'August,' Steppenwolf playwright serves up 'Superior Donuts'
Talk about a hard act to follow. For the past year, playwright Tracy Letts has been basking in the sort of phenomenal success that few playwrights ever enjoy. Think of it this way: Were he a horse, he'd have won the Triple Crown, and then some.
Letts' play, "August: Osage County," the tragicomic portrait of an American family, bolted out of the starting gate in its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre last summer, charged into the lead with its Broadway debut in December, and subsequently won the bragging rights that come with a national tour, a London production and a film version of the play, all three of which are now in the works.
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Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
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Along the way, Letts also has spent a good deal of time collecting virtually all the preeminent theater trophies around: the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for best production of a play, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award.
Meanwhile, this weekend promises to bring a whole new round of attention to Letts as his first post-"August" play, "Superior Donuts" -- set in a doughnut shop in Chicago's changing Uptown neighborhood -- receives its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre. Not surprisingly, all eyes and ears will be focused intently (perhaps unhealthily so) on how the drama, already a work-in-progress by the time "August" caught fire, measures up.
It's not exactly a matter of "the second novel syndrome" for Letts.
Before the phenomenon of "August," he wrote three plays, all of which garnered considerable attention. The first, "Killer Joe" (1993), a sex-and-violence-ridden tale about trailer park inhabitants, debuted in Chicago, went on to Edinburgh, London and New York, and now receives frequent revivals. His psycho-thriller "Bug," which debuted in London in 1996, arrived at Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre in 2001 and ran for 384 performances at New York's Barrow Street Theatre in 2004, became a William Friedkin film in 2007 (for which Letts supplied the screenplay). And his most uncharacteristic drama, "The Man from Nebraska," which debuted at Steppenwolf in 2003 -- it's the tale of a middle-aged, Middle American man suffering an extreme crisis of faith -- was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.
But the stakes are ever higher.
"There's a lot going on here right now," Letts admitted when we chatted a few weeks ago. "People have been telling me it's time to hire a personal assistant, but I wouldn't know how to deal with that, so I'm trying to manage everything myself. Frankly, a lot of this stuff is out of my control. It has just taken on a life of its own."
"Superior Donuts," directed by Tina Landau, features Michael Mc-Kean (familiar from "This Is Spinal Tap," "A Mighty Wind," "Saturday Night Live" and, most recently, the Broadway revival of "The Homecoming"), as Arthur Przybyszewski, the second-generation Polish-American owner of a rundown doughnut shop. Jon Michael Hill plays the black teenager who works for him (and has dreams of updating the place) with Yasen Peyankov as the owner of a neighboring DVD shop.
"This is the first play I've written that is set in Chicago," said Letts, who was born and bred in Oklahoma and whose previous works have been set primarily on the plains. "It began when I realized there were practically no more independently owned doughnut shops on the West Side these days; Dunkin' Donuts had kind of put them out of business.
"But beyond that, I've been living in Chicago for more than 20 years now and haven't dealt with my adopted home," he noted, adding he lives just a few blocks from Steppenwolf and has every intention of staying put in Chicago. "Of course, I have a love-hate relationship with this place, as you do with any big city you might live in. On the plus side, there is a real spirit of industriousness here, and not a lot of pretension. Things that might fly on either coast would not fly here, and I love that hardscrabble spirit of the place. But Chicago also can be a tough town with a sharp dividing line between the haves and have-nots -- a line that can be sharply drawn and oppressive."
And as "a theater guy," he says, "in my own way I've been on both sides of that divide. Of course you hope that with the natural progression of age you will cross the divide, but most people struggle to make it and don't. And it's not like being in the theater where you get a lot of strokes along the way -- strokes that most people never get."
As for working on "Donuts" in the wake of so much celebrity, Letts confessed: "It was good to have that grounding experience of doing the hard and humbling work of getting the play ready. A lot of revision had to be done during rehearsal, regardless of what was going on in New York. It's still all about making sense of the story from beat to beat, figuring out if a scene adds up and if the whole thing is telling the story I want to tell. It's both fun and mundane in its way, though by now it is not totally elusive. I can cut through things and deal with the problems more quickly."
For Landau (who took over directing "Donuts" after its initially announced director, Amy Morton, decided to remain in the Broadway cast of "August"), Letts is "a playwright with super powers."
"He just has some uncanny ability to write dialogue, and to create characters and situations that generate a live reaction in the theater," she said. "I've never seen anything quite like it. And I don't quite know what it is, though it has something to do with the way his one-liners land. Also, his use of plot -- the way he can work with reversal and twists and revelations -- is just very satisfying to an audience and not completely contrived. I've spent so much of my career working on ambitious, difficult pieces, struggling to make them land. Tracy just has a talent for knowing what works on a stage."
"Superior Donuts" is realistic -- unusual material for Landau-- "but I've enjoyed approaching it completely naturalistically," she said. "And while it's completely grounded, there also is something about it that at times tips it into a heightened thing, a touch surreal even."
As for dealing with the inevitable expectations bound to arise given the success of "August," Landau observed: "Tracy and I agreed not to exert any pressure on ourselves to take this play anywhere but where it is supposed to be. We're just doing the play. And one of the best things about working on this show has been getting to know Tracy. My impression was that he was very dry, a little cynical and dark, with a twisted sensibility. But the guy is a mensch -- one of the most generous, open, feeling, emotional men I've ever encountered."
That doesn't stop the playwright's girlfriend, actress Nicole Wiesner, from playfully describing him as "insufferable." As for the playwright's mother, novelist Billie Letts, she confesses she is glad such success came when he is a little more seasoned (he will celebrate his 43rd birthday on July 4th) and perhaps better able to handle it. She also tells stories of how, during their childhood, her older son, composer Shawn Letts, would cast Tracy (who has spent a significant portion of his career as an actor) in original scenarios and force him to repeat his performance until he got it absolutely right. Talk about apocryphal starts.
Next up for Letts is a commission from South Coast Rep in Orange County, Calif., a world premiere adaptation of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" for Artists Rep in Portland, Ore., opening in May, 2009, and the "August" screenplay. And once "Donuts" opens, he says he definitely plans to "take a nap."
Like son, like mother: Hedy Weiss interviews Tracy Letts' mother, Billie Letts, whose new novel is Made in the U.S.A. in our Books section.