3/9/2023 0 Comments Haskell letts![]() ![]() “There isn’t a star system here,” he said. Steppenwolf, with its ensemble company, had a similar vibe. “I did this play and people were nice to me,” Letts said, adding “it had that social element that I wanted to repeat.” “They just kind of tumbled out,” he said.Įach recent production has seemingly moved Letts - who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the epic family drama “August: Osage County” - further away from his earlier reputation as enfant terrible, which he says was always overstated anyway. Letts, who has been sober for nearly three decades, says he has no explanation for the last decade’s prolific spurt of writing. “The Minutes” came during a period of creative ferment for Letts, during which he wrote “Mary Page Marlowe,” a play inspired in part by his mother, the novelist Billie Letts, who died in 2014, and “Linda Vista,” which he said was inspired by some friends and fellow 50-somethings, “good fellows who have made some mistakes.” (He also finished an unproduced play, “The Scavenger’s Daughter,” which he said was too big and peculiar to get a showing.) “It might have been a little weird when I wrote it,” he said, “but it seems less and less weird with each passing day.” ![]() “Quite frankly, when I did it before I thought the world was as bad as it could get and now, the situation is far more precarious,” Shapiro said, adding, the play was now “less abut a bad place that’s been bad for awhile, and more about the moment that a community, and a culture, turns.” Indeed, Coon, who fell in love with Letts as she played Honey in “Virginia Woolf,” says the current grind is so intense that Letts is threatening to retire, something she teases him about. The opening of “The Minutes” and the closing of “Bug” are scheduled for the same day, and Letts, a first-time father at 52, describes his family’s current chaos - toddler, rehearsal, performance, repeat - like “planning the battle of Midway everyday.” Letts’s fatigue, of course, has more to do than with just his performance: his son, Haskell, will turn 2 just days before Letts opens on Broadway, and just as his wife and Haskell’s mother, the actress Carrie Coon, finishes a revival of “Bug,” his 1996 creepy-crawly conspiracy comedy, at Steppenwolf. “If I’d known that I was going to wind up doing it I wouldn’t have given him so many goddamn lines,” Letts said of Superba. So it is that Letts - who won a Tony Award in 2013 for his take as George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” - has been stumbling his way through rehearsals as an actor and then stumbling home to do rewrites as a playwright, trying to tweak the script while also cursing the writer. “You go through a few of those people and then you go, the hell with it, I’ll do it,” Letts said.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |