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DRAMA 101 - Playwright - Tracy Letts

Drama 101 playwright presentation - Tracy Letts by Pamela Cain (sorry, the spacing was all messed up when I uploaded it)

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525 views2 pages

DRAMA 101 - Playwright - Tracy Letts

Drama 101 playwright presentation - Tracy Letts by Pamela Cain (sorry, the spacing was all messed up when I uploaded it)

Uploaded by

drama101spscc
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Pamela Cain

Drama 101
Playwright Presentation

Tracy Letts

1) Tracy Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 4, 1965. He has written several plays:

Killer Joe in 1998, Man From Nebraska in 2003, Bug in 2004, August: Osage County in

2007, Superior Donuts in 2008, and Three Sisters in 2009.

Several of the awards he won for August: Osage County include the 2008 Drama Desk Award for
Outstanding Play, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the 2008 Tony Award for Best Play. Man
From Nebraska was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2004.
Lett's father, Dennis Letts, was a college professor and actor, and his mother, Billie Letts, was the best-
selling author of Where the Heart Is. He was a founding member of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theatre,
and he acted in several plays and movies, including The Glass Menagerie and Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?

▪ Man From Nebraska is about a middle-ages insurance agent’s daily life. However, Ken

Carpenter wakes up one night to find that he no longer believes in God. This crisis of faith

propels an ordinary middle-aged man into an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. This

spiritually complex play examines the effects of one man’s awakening on himself and his

family.

In Bug, the setting is mostly a sleazy motel room. The plot centers around the meeting between Agnes,
a divorced cocktail waitress addicted to cocaine, and Peter, an AWOL Gulf War veteran introduced to
her by her lesbian friend, R.C. Agnes stays at a hotel to avoid her abusive ex-husband, who was just
released from prison. A relationship develops between Agnes and Peter. Jerry tracks Agnes down,
expecting to resume their relationship, while there’s a hidden bug infestation problem that has both
Agnes and Peter dealing with scathing welts and festering sores. This leads Peter to believe this is the
result of experiments conducted on him during his stay at an army hospital. Their fears soon escalate to
paranoia, conspiracy theories, and twisted psychological motives.
August: Osage County is about the reunion of the Weston family. The head of the Weston family,
Beverly, disappears for five days, and the rest of his family reminisce and share stories about him and
each other. Through several scenes and anecdotes, the audience learns about the range of emotions that
the Weston family members feel for each other, everything from animosity to guilt. When the family
learns that Beverly has been found drowned in a lake (presumably by suicide), conflicts and tensions
within the family escalate. Beverly's wife, Violet, who is addicted to several prescription drugs,
violently confronts her daughter, Barbara, as the rest of the family try to make sense of the hatred
between mother and daughter. Barbara confronts her mother about her drug addiction and rids the
house of her prescription drugs, and several illicit relationships are discovered, such as the relationship
between Little Charles and Ivy, who thought they were first cousins, but are actually half brother and
sister through an adulterous relationship between Beverly and Violet's sister, Mattie Fae. By the end of
the play, Violet's daughters have left the house, and it is implied that the family relationships have been
permanently fractured.
7) Letts' plays are darkly comedic and have been about normal, flawed characters struggling with

moral and spiritual questions. His plays explore many taboo or realistic subjects such as

drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, death, family dysfunction, sexual harassment, pedophilia, a

ging, generational change, racism, incest, and infidelity.

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