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The Treatment

Tracy Letts: August: Osage County

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6639 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2014

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Playwright, screenwriter and actor Tracy Letts talks about being a 'Natural Born Dramatist.'

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:14.9

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,

0:23.4

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

0:27.8

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

0:33.5

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

0:39.0

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

0:40.5

Thanks for having me.

0:41.8

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

0:48.4

I suppose, I suppose.

0:50.1

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

0:53.6

You know, I'm influenced by everything.

0:56.0

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

1:03.6

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

1:11.2

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

1:15.7

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

1:20.5

And I wonder where that comes from for you.

1:23.9

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

1:31.7

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

1:43.1

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

1:46.2

he talked about describing the Jodes,

1:48.2

trying to find the over-essence was his word.

1:52.6

You know, so I think with those characters,

...

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