Playwright’s Pulitzer-Winning Work is About Oklahoma Family

By Heather Warlick, The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City

Apr. 9–Oklahoma native Tracy Letts said you can’t write a play in hopes of winning a Pulitzer Prize. Sometimes it happens, though.

Letts, who grew up in Durant, on Monday won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play, “August: Osage County.”

“It sort of stands out as something any writer would hope for, but it’s not something you can anticipate and certainly not something you can try to get,” Letts said Tuesday.

The Tulsa-born actor/writer is the son of English professors, Dennis and Billie Letts, who taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. As a child, Letts said, he was a “goofball, smart-aleck” whose interests in the theater and the arts meant that he didn’t quite fit in.

“I mean, I fell in love with the theater and coming from our part of the country, it just doesn’t seem to be a very vital part of the culture there,” Letts said. “I went to Dallas for a couple of years and just hated Dallas. So I naturally moved to Chicago, because there’s such a great vibrant theater scene here, and they were doing the kind of work that I wanted to be doing.”

In Chicago, Letts lives just a couple of blocks from the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where he has been an ensemble member for more than 20 years, and where his Pulitzer Prize winning play debuted before it opened on Broadway in 2007.

The plot of “August: Osage County” is based loosely on experiences in Letts’ life: his grandfather committed suicide when Letts was 10, and then his grandmother began a slow spiral into drug addiction. The play has been hailed by the New York Times as “flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years.” It is an emotionally intense yet comedic three-and-a-half hour journey into the dysfunction of an Oklahoma family.

Dennis Letts played the role of Beverly Weston in the original Steppenwolf Theater Company production and later in the Broadway production. He died in February. Letts said his father was the perfect person for the role because of his fierce intelligence, his authenticity as an Oklahoman, and “a certain sadness about the world I think that my father had and shared with the character.”

Billie Letts is the author of the best-selling novel, “Where the Heart Is.” She lives in Tulsa. Of all the influences who molded Letts, he said his parents were the most important. For him and his brothers, Shawn and Dana, the couple “introduced us to a world of art and literature and hopefully truth and beauty and things like that that still today are very much a part of my life. They just made my life as rich as it is.”

Letts is finishing a new play, “Superior Donuts” which will open at the Steppenwolf Theater Company this summer. His advice to aspiring playwrights?

“Write. Write frequently, write often, write all the time,” he said.

And make sure your work gets produced, whether by a theater company or yourself. “I mean, there was a long period of time when people would not produce my stuff, so I produced it myself to make sure that my stuff got up. I think that the only way you can learn, ultimately, about the craft is through the experience of doing it, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t, trying something else. Persevering that way.

“Even if it’s no good, it’s still a rewarding experience.”

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Copyright (c) 2008, The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City

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