Tracy Letts Is Still Haunted by His Past

By Alex Witchel - The New York Times

In 2008, Tracy Letts won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for his play “August: Osage County,” a multigenerational drama presided over by a mother whose cancer of the mouth is both literal and figurative. It is O’Neill for Okies, based on a seminal event in Letts’s own Durant, Okla., family: His maternal grandfather’s suicide (Letts was 10 at the time) and his grandmother’s ensuing drug addiction. Although Letts, 48, has written other successful plays — the violent and misogynistic “Killer Joe” and the paranoid and bloody “Bug” — “August,” three acts that last more than three hours, was epic in every way: its sweep, its humor and its sorrow. (The movie version, released last year, lost plenty in translation, but then again, most movie versions do.)