Plot Summary

It is a furnace-hot August in 2007 in the small, mid-western town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, USA, sixty miles northwest of Tulsa. Beverly Weston, alcoholic and former poet, has mysteriously disappeared after hiring a Cheyenne Native American as a live-in housekeeper for his pill-popping, chain-smoking wife Violet. With the disappearance of the patriarch, three generations of the dysfunctional Weston family gather together in the large country home on the baking mid-western plains for the first time in years where ensues drug abuse, alcohol abuse, verbal abuse, domestic abuse, addiction, wit, cancer, mental illness, academia, literature, infidelity, incest, suicide, secrets, resentment, and estrangement.

August: Osage County is a dark comedy that doubles audiences in laughter one moment and then gasps them in shock the next moment without warning and without apology. But throughout and above the chaos, August: Osage County is a play about family. It is a play about a group of people who, despite fierce vices and deep-rooted differences, are tightly bound by blood, vows, and a long, damaged history. Now, together for the first time in years, this family must deal with each other and with the decades of baggage each brings as 13 people meet face-to-face in the pressure cooker of a single house on the broiling American Plains.

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Bryer, Jackson R. and Hartig, Mary, C. (2010) The Facts on File Companion to American Drama. 2^nd ed. New York: Infobase Publishing, pp 42-4.