August: Osage County – The Play’s the Thing

August: Osage County – the movie – was a play first.  The reluctant wife and I went to see it on Broadway five or six years ago.  It was a very odd experience.  It was a hot play, but I think we might have gotten half price tickets – or maybe just the cheapest seats – they were in the very back row of the balcony a million miles from the stage.  The weirdness started, though, in the lobby.  There was a buzz in the place.  People were selling T-shirts with August: Osage County emblazoned across them.  It was like being at a rock concert.  Sometimes there is this kind of atmosphere on Broadway, but in my experience it is usually at a musical.  And this was a play.  And a heavy play at that.  Weird. (Recently we went to see Hamilton and the experience was like that, but on steroids).

So, we are in the back of this big theater – I can’t remember if there was a curtain, but the stage was dominated by a huge three story house that opened up to the theater – and that had – at least in my memory – space for a truck to drive up beside it.  Now, my memory is notoriously bad for details and it has been a long time since the play – so I remember at best bits and pieces of what took place – but I remember the feeling.  It was like watching an operatic tragedy.  Every time you thought the family situation couldn’t get worse, it did.  Much more so.  But what was weird was the reaction of the audience.  With each new wave of tragic family mess – the audience began to laugh.  I felt discomforted by it.  These were terribly destructive things that were being described and enacted.  Drugs and alcohol and vicious comments paraded across the stage.  People tore into each other.  People killed themselves.  And others, who could have prevented it didn’t.  And these people clearly loved each other and were bent on destroying each other….

And we laughed.  It took me a while to join in.  I felt guilty.  After all, laughing at other’s misfortunes is not something a psychoanalyst, reluctant or not, should do – but laugh I did.  At first I laughed timidly, but then with force – not at the characters, but at the situation, which was tragic – powerfully so.  People who loved each other were cruel to each other.  And it felt increasingly cathartic to laugh.  To cry would have felt – I don’t know – disempowering?  I’m not sure.  The mother of the family – the woman who seemed to be the primary source of all this terrible delicious unbearable grief seemed, at least in my memory, to simply be a force of nature – releasing a monsoon, a tempest of bad juju on those around her.  And there was a terrible understanding that all of these parts, all of this grief, all of this bad, bad feeling hung together like a puzzle – each piece connected to every other and, as in opera, there was a terrible beauty to the symmetry of it all – a terrible, hilarious beauty to the symmetry.

So when the film was released, I was interested in going to see it: but it was widely panned.  Meryl Streep – and Julia Roberts – between them seemed to have destroyed this movie.  What was light and buoyant on the stage became overbearing on the screen.  So, I stayed away.  Why watch something that I had liked be destroyed?  But then it came up on the Netflix recommendations and I thought, “What the heck.  I wonder what this thing that I now barely remember – I wonder what happened when it migrated from stage to screen.”  So I pushed the button and a terrible (in the best sense of that word), mean spirited harpy appeared on the screen.  Meryl Streep portrayed a woman who was just hell on wheels.  She would have run circles around my somewhat crazy feisty grandmother – run circles around her and put her in a meat grinder.  She just veered from one bad moment to the next.  And yet I don’t think that it was Streep’s performance that was at fault (see a critical essay about a performance of hers on Broadway in A Delicate Balance here – I’m not always taken with her).  I think it was the change in media that doomed the movie.

August: Osage County is set in Oklahoma.  I don’t remember this to be the case, but in the Broadway version I might have been concerned that the sophisticated New Yorkers were simply laughing at those Okies from the sticks.  I assume the two were closely related – the screenplay was written by the playwright, but, with a few minor exceptions, the movie did not help me remember the play.  They felt more like distant cousins than identical or even fraternal twins.  But certainly both were set in Oklahoma.  And certainly the Meryl Streep character referred to the woman her husband hired to look after her while she was treated for mouth cancer as an “injun” in both renditions – but it felt harsh on the screen – anachronistic and just mean – while on stage I can imagine that it felt curious and odd – like watching something on the street. 

One time my friend, The Wired Hermit, came to town and went shopping with us at a local grocery store in a rough part of town.  He is a psychologist as well as a hermit, so when we warned him that he might see or hear things that he wasn’t used to, he reassured us that he would be fine.  Well, as if on cue, we went into the grocery store and saw a child begging his mother for a toy or a piece of candy.  The mother yelled at him, “What do you think?  I sh*t money?”  The wired hermit said, “Oh, I see what you mean.”  And we went on with our shopping.

The experience was of watching something from afar.  It was appalling, and I felt upset – especially for the child, but only momentarily.  The swirl of shopping took us onto other things.  That said, these many years later, it is remembered.  And I could imagine myself as that child if I tried, but that is not the first level of contact – the first level is more distant.  I think the way the New Yorkers and I experienced the play – as something alive and present, but also distant (OK, everybody else at the play was sitting closer than we, but you know what I mean).  On the screen – even our relatively small screen – Meryl Streep was right there – bigger than life.  I could see each line on her baggy face – and she wasn’t someone I was driving by – but someone who was present – omnipresent – oppressively present – overwhelming in the way that poor child (I’m imagining) must have experienced his mother – not as someone who can be left – but as someone who is itching for a fight – not just with her family, but with me.  The tension in the room does not have the quality that we analysts refer to as an “as if” quality – it was not like while also being unlike unpleasant moments in my interactions with my grandmother – it was godawful.

A candidate (student) at our psychoanalytic institute graduated on Friday.  She is what we call a “research candidate”, meaning that she is not a clinician, but an academic who studies texts and films and videos and writes about them from a psychoanalytic perspective, and she decided to join us to learn more about contemporary psychoanalytic practice – and authors (The academy tends to rely on the tried and true golden oldies like Freud and Winnicott as their source material for theories about human functioning rather than referencing contemporary clinically based psychoanalytic writing).  Her particular interests include the phenomenon of reality TV.  As we discussed this, we also talked about the ways that we connect with movie (and reality) stars.  It seems that their lives – and our gossip about them – connect us.  We live in a small community – almost with them.  When my stepdaughters talk about them, it is as if they are close friends and neighbors.  One of them might say, “Oh, I didn’t know Rhianna was dating Beauregard,” as if she should know that, as if Rhianna should have told her, for goodness sake.  Of course my son and I regularly talk about sports players as if we knew them, too.  

So does the large and small screen makes these people real to us in ways that they aren’t on stage?  Well, I think we first need to consider the importance of actors.  Because they are human, because they are human beings, I think that they stitch together the characters that they play – they fill in the gaps – gaps that are apparent in a character, for instance in a cartoon – even one as well done as the recent Inside Out  – that is explicitly looking at character.  We don’t see the nuances, the reactions that – though perhaps coached by a director, and practiced in schools - also come from the recesses of a particular individual’s mind – a mind that is then mediated by the particular muscles of the face and body that this person uses not just to portray others, but to live their own lives – to inhabit themselves.  And we thus see both a version of the character and a version of the person who is portraying the character – some mixture of the two - that has a depth - a three dimensional quality that no character can have.

When Stephen King was run over on a Maine road by a man driving a pickup truck who was not watching the road because he was reaching behind the seat to get a beer out of the cooler and to swat his dog who was howling out the back window, a reporter on NPR asked him whether the driver was like a character in one of his books.  Stephen King disagreed strongly, stating that any person is infinitely more complex than any character that he could create.  And I think that actors make characters come to life – as do we, when we read a good novel by a gifted who writer who both hints at the character, but also leaves us room to animate him or her with our own memories, but also projections from our own psyche.

I think that August: Osage County on stage left us enough room to be able to distance ourselves from the characters – to objectify them in ways that are similar to the ways the we objectify injuns and Okies – there but for the grace of God go I – and allowed us to have ample distance from both our projections and identifications with them so that there could be an interplay between our conscious emotional experience and our unconscious one – so that we could laugh and not know that we were laughing at the ways that this connected with our own lived experience, but to experience the genuine emotion – the cathartic emotion – from that experience and to translate it, not into tears, but into laughter – an affect that might be even more cleansing than crying.  We left the theater feeling unburdened, not weighted down.

On the screen, similar material had the opposite effect.  Instead of a character at some distance, like the woman in the grocery store, Meryl Streep was this awful woman who had a history that led her to be awful, but also a person who, regardless of our sympathy for her plight, was just plain mean and the “as if” quality of the interaction collapsed.  I don’t want to generalize yet about this.  I think it relates to many things, including Telephone Treatment, and our tendency to isolate ourselves with various screens (including, of course, the one you are looking at now).  It is certainly the case that seeing things on screens can also numb us or distance us from the plight of many, as well as make them real.  What makes one thing happen in one instance versus another – why does August: Osage County have a tragi-comic impact on stage – or an opera fail to transfer to the screen for reasons related to the type of observing you are doing, and, something I haven’t talked about here, being in contact with an audience that is sharing the experience with you – whether a sporting event seen on the screen, with all its close ups – loses something essential (the reluctant son and I saw Lebron play in person - and he is much more fluid, much less muscular, than on the small screen), despite the fact that college and professional sports are having an increasingly difficult time selling tickets – and whether online learning (talked about in MOOCS and SMOCS) is the equivalent of the in person experience – these are big and important questions that we should be working to better understand.

Live theater is a scary thing.  It hangs in the air, alive with possibility.  I sometimes fear that I will cry out at a performance - something that we all get to do at the end of a really good performance, or at the end of a really good play in a sporting event - or to distract the other team when they are preparing to do something critical.  There is something deeply human, deeply satisfying about being in the presence of an artist performing - and something deeply satisfying about being that artist -whether one is talking with one's analyst or analysand, or with an audience of one or ten thousand.  There is an opportunity to create something as tenuous and momentary as a laugh or as lasting as the memory of a mother berating her child, or Martin Luther King's I have a Dream speech - a speech that was, so I'm told, at least partly extemporaneous.  How do we master the fear that we will cry out - or choke - to have nothing of value to say?  How do we keep our wits about us and articulate something that is meaningful?  This is worth knowing.  And it is worth teaching to our children - so that they can touch each other in the most intimate way imaginable - with each other's minds.


To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...