Tracy Letts, dark and light

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When playwright Tracy Letts walked into New York rehearsals for the touring production of his “August: Osage County” earlier this summer, he did not find the fellow Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble members who blew away brittle New York aesthetes with their gale-force, Chicago-style acting in Letts’ devastating Broadway play. Although a few of the touring cast members — mostly notably, the widely acclaimed Estelle Parson— had done the show as Broadway replacements during the long New York run, and many have ties to both Letts and other Chicago theaters, the famously dysfunctional Westons of Oklahoma are being played on the road by none of the original cast.

“I really have to say,” Letts says over lunch, a devilish grin on his face, “I was kind of relieved not to be looking across the table at the same exhausted faces.

Even though he had written his Pulitzer Prize-winning play especially for them. Even though he knew where most of the bodies were buried in the infamously complex web of relationships — professional, romantic, always personal — that have been part of the Steppenwolf gestalt ever since Gary Sinise, Jeff Perry and Terry Kinney founded this most famous of Chicago theaters in 1974 and dragged it to fame, longevity and international acclaim by the sweat of their own ambition. Letts was happy to see some gung-ho fresh meat taking his play out west.

“August: Osage County,” which premiered to critical acclaim in Chicago during the summer of 2007 and opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Sept. 9, is the semi-autobiographical story of three adult, angst-laden sisters who return home to their pill-popping mother’s house of emotional horrors following the mysterious disappearance of their father, a sometime writer and a constant drinker. A symphony of domestic violence ensues, conducted by the caustically manipulative Violet Weston, who knows how to reduce her hapless family to self-doubting blubber on the Plains.

For an in-depth look at Letts’ career today, by Chris Jones, click here for Sunday’s Arts & Books story.