“August: Osage County” Actor Dies
Some people I know have complained that the universally loved play “August: Osage County,” now on Broadway, gets off to a slow start. The first scene features an 70something gentleman, who is also a poet and former professor, putting back the liquor and talking about T.S. Eliot and John Berryman to a young Native American woman who has come to his house seeking a job. I find this opening sequence almost unbearably moving, partly because of what happens to the man and partly because the dramatist, Tracy Letts, had the courage to open his sprawling family saga with a exchange that is so…quiet. Now comes news that Dennis Letts (pictured), the actor who had been playing the role since the piece premiered last summer at Steppenwolf in Chicago, has died of cancer. He was 73.
