This weekend, The Village Playhouse and Repertory Co. in Mount Pleasant began its running of August: Osage County, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner that has inspired critical praise as the first "Great American Play" in decades.

Friday and Saturday night's shows sold out quickly, and for good reason. The Village Playhouse has produced the three-and-a-half hour play in all its complexity, humanity, humor and tragedy, making it feel no longer than an a film, yet as enduring and resounding as only a work of theatre can be.

Just when the American family seemed to be spent as a subject for literature, playwright Tracy Letts wrote August: Osage County, casting a modern light—or shadow--on a classic theme.

The play begins with the Weston family's patriarch, Beverly, spouting a few vague lines of T.S. Eliot's poetry between sips of scotch to his hired cook, then suddenly disappearing. The next day the family learns that he took his boat out to sea and drowned himself. His family turns inside out, and this gives nothing away, for the play is driven not by a suicide mystery, but by the dark family secrets that float to the surface along with Beverly's body.

There are affairs, sibling rivalries, a pedophile, a crumbling marriage, an illegitimate child, and a pot-smoking teenager. But at the center of it all, at once the victim and the cause of the pain, there is Violet, the pain-pill-popping widow of Beverly.

The New York Times called August: Osage County "the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years," and it is. But more exciting still is V.P. Director Keely Enright's moving rendition of it. All of the actors are at least very good in their parts, and at least two of them, coincidentally the oldest and the youngest, are incredible. Leaving the show, one finds it hard to imagine two more effective actresses for their respective characters.

Samille Basler, a veteran of local productions, dominates the play as the maddened widow, and young Katharine Chaney, who will begin school in New York City next month, is mesmerizing in a minor role as a naïve and rebellious teenager.

The play never feels overdone or overacted, and with the unusually cozy venue of the Village Playhouse interior, audience members feel like they are sitting in the Westons' living room.

In the climactic second act of the play, there is a dinner scene following Beverly's funeral in which Violet's drugs act as a sort of truth serum, causing her to ruthlessly dig up every single family secret that has been carefully covered throughout the play, and set them on the table for all to stare at while they eat.

"You never had any real problems so you got to make all your problems yourselves," she says coldly to her family at large. When one of her three daughters asks why she is yelling at them, Violet says: "Just time we had some truths told 'round here's all. Damn fine day, tell the truth."

Whenever Samille Basler leaves the stage, there is an audible collective sigh of exhaustion from the audience, so intense and riveting is her performance.

The Weston family is afflicted, it laments, with "the plains," an Oklahoma condition of ennui similar to the famous "blues" of the delta sharecroppers, and the whole play is infused with a bleak sense of isolated struggle, which seems to serve as a metaphor for America as a nation in the twenty-first century.

August:<0x00A0> Osage County is for mature audiences only due to adult language and content. Please note the curtain is earlier than most Village productions. The show runs until Sept. 5, and shows are Thursday nights at 7 p.m. and Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 p.m., with two Sunday matinees at 5 p.m. Tickets for August: Osage County are $27 for adults, $25 for seniors and $20 for students with $12 student rush tickets sold at the door (subject to availability).

Purchase 24 hours at www.villageplayhouse.comor call the box office at 856-1579. The Village Playhouse is located at 730 Coleman Blvd. Mt Pleasant in the Brookgreen Towncenter behind the Starbucks.

(Chris McCandlish can be reached at news@moultrienews.com.)