From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I'm honored to be sitting across from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tony Award-winning, actor, playwright, Tracy Letts,

who's found a way to bring Gothic noir into almost everything he does,

with the exception of maybe a man from Nebraska and one of my favorite plays of the 21st century, Superior Donuts.

But he's here to talk about the adaptation of his play, Auguste Ossage County, which is now a film directed by John Wells.

First of all, thanks once for being here, Tracy.

Thanks for having me.

And the idea of Gothic noir, I mean, it really sort of pervades a lot of what you do.

I suppose, I suppose.

I don't know that that's conscious necessarily.

You know, I'm influenced by everything.

So once you put it all in the stew pot, the way it comes out, it is kind of, I don't know,

I hope it's very human, but there is a darkness or a macabre side to some of the stuff I do.

So in the characters, may I think about bug or about Violet in L.C.H. County,

these characters kind of know that they're bigger than life and have a presentational aspect to them.

And I wonder where that comes from for you.

I suppose it comes just from a certain size of personality of people in my family or people I grew up with.

But I also just think dramatists, natural-born dramatists, they have a knack for finding some of those larger pieces of people.

Or, you know, when Steinbeck was writing Grapes of Rath,

he talked about describing the Jodes,

trying to find the over-essence was his word.

You know, so I think with those characters,

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