‘August: Osage County’ @ Lakeside Community Theatre (The Colony)

—Rickey Wax

I have seen Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County at least seven times now, including twice in New York at different theaters, and it is always fascinating to see how each director approaches the text. Some lean into its operatic scale while others focus on its claustrophobia. At Lakeside Community Theatre, which opens its 25th season with this challenging work, director Ryan Lee finds a balance between extremes, allowing the play’s brutality and dark humor to exist side by side.

Set during a sweltering Oklahoma summer, the play begins with disappearance. Beverly Weston, played by Paul Niles, an alcoholic poet already halfway out the door emotionally, hires young Native American woman Johnna as a housekeeper, and offers her what amounts to his own thesis statement: “My wife takes pills and I drink… cruel covenant.” Soon after, he vanishes, leaving behind Violet and their three daughters. What follows is less a reunion than a slow excavation. Old wounds are reopened and secrets surface. Letts’ world makes clear early that this family did not break overnight. The house becomes an emotional dig site, each room yielding something buried.

Adriana Bate delivers a fearless, volatile Violet Weston. Her insults arrive in matter-of-fact tones—not loud, often disguised as casual observation, which makes them land even harder. Caroline Rivera’s Barbara meets her head on. Rivera delivers a bravura performance and charts Barbara’s unraveling carefully, showing how easily the daughter becomes the mother she fears. At one point, watching her struggle to wrestle a fitted sheet onto an air mattress, she looks like she is fighting for her life. When she finally gives up, it plays like a quiet surrender, a metaphor for everything else she cannot fix. Natasha Braun-Bueno’s Ivy carries quiet resignation, and I appreciated how she saves her flashes of anger for exactly the right moments. Noelle Saul’s Karen is a big, bubbly ball of Florida sunshine; she’s a mess. Saul radiates that denial beautifully, delivering her long monologues in breathless bursts that reveal just how fragile Karen’s optimism really is.

Together, the three daughters represent different survival strategies. Barbara leaves, only to discover she has inherited more than she escaped. Ivy stays, sacrificing herself to proximity and obligation. Karen runs, choosing fantasy over truth. And standing outside all of it is caretaker Johnna (Zambrae Heard-Saenz), who observes without becoming consumed. When Johnna explains that her people carry their umbilical cord so their souls will always know where they belong, it becomes clear that the Westons have lost that connection entirely. They remain trapped in a house that has defined them, whether they stayed or not.

The extended family forms a fully realized ecosystem of damage and denial. Teri Lynn Williams brings sharp specificity to Mattie Fae, hilarious especially when Charlie says, “You’re drinking whiskey,” and she fires back, “I’m having a cocktail.” Williams balances comedy and cruelty with remarkable ease, particularly in her treatment of Little Charles. Ian Grygotis gives him a heartbreaking softness, his stutter and slouched physicality making him seem permanently apologetic. Kenneth Fulenwider’s Charlie provides a grounded steadiness; his dinner table prayer as the reluctant new patriarch becomes both a moment of humor and something much sadder. Heard-Saenz’s Johnna serves as the production’s moral center, observing the chaos with a steady calm, and stepping in and out of scenes with excellent timing.

The dinner table scene remains the play’s breaking point. Violet, drifting between lucidity and medication, lashes out at everyone in reach. She tells Barbara she broke Beverly’s heart. She tells Ivy she looks like “a schlub.” She continues swallowing pills while insisting she is fine. Rivera’s Barbara spends the entire scene trying to hold the line, until she cannot anymore. When she finally shouts, “I’m running things now,” the shift is unmistakable. You hear Violet in her voice, and we see the inheritance happening in real time. Earlier, Barbara begged her mother, “I will not go through this with you again… These fucking pills.” But by dinner, she already has.

From that point on, everything becomes messier. Words are weaponized. Truths drift in the air long after they are spoken. The first intermission, and there are two, thankfully, arrives at exactly the right moment. You can feel the audience exhale, grateful for the pause, while knowing the family still has a long way to fall. Letts warned us from the beginning. “Life is very long,” Beverly says. In this house, it feels endless.

What has always made this play endure is its ensemble nature, and that is especially true here. The characters, the performers all exist in the same emotional universe, which is what makes this work.

There are moments where projection could be stronger, particularly during some of the more emotionally charged exchanges where lines occasionally felt swallowed by the space. Similarly, a few musical cues arrived at a volume that overpowered the dialogue, briefly pulling focus away from Letts’ language, which remains the play’s most powerful tool.

What deserves special recognition is the presence of intimacy coordinator Gabbi Enriquez. The scene between Jean (Lauren Robertson) and Steve (Aaron Schultz) is one of the most unsettling in contemporary theater, and here it was handled with remarkable care. The staging remained restrained, allowing the discomfort to exist without exploitation. Robertson and Schultz deserve equal praise for their control and professionalism, trusting the material and giving the moment the full weight it requires.

August: Osage County is not an easy play. It is not supposed to be. It is about what families inherit, whether they want to or not.

Lakeside Community Theatre’s production is a strong and thoughtful start to their 25th anniversary season, and proof that the wounds in this play still cut deep.

WHEN: February 13-28, 2026
WHERE: ​6303 Main Street, The Colony, TX
WEB: lctthecolony.com