Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy Letts in New York. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP
At last, the Pulitzer prize for drama has gone to a truly superb American play. The three-and-a-half-hour August: Osage County by Tracy Letts has, as expected, won US theatre's most coveted prize, seeing off competition from two fine contenders, Christopher Shinn's Dying City and David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face.
Letts's play seemed a sure thing for the award as soon as it opened on Broadway in December. Here is that time-honoured American theatrical staple - the family play - given the sort of size and heft associated with Eugene O'Neill, crossed with Edward Albee at his bitchiest and most biting.
The play follows a supremely dysfunctional Oklahoman clan converging on the home of a dying, poison-tongued matriarch. That there are three sisters who, Chekhov-style, dominate a long dinner scene gives a further clue as to this playwright's influences. But Letts's "madhouse", in the words of eldest daughter Barbara (the magnificent Amy Morton), is America itself. The clan chokes on the collective bile that is part of the Bush era's unmistakable legacy.
August: Osage County may be that rare Pulitzer winner that actually does make it in London. The capital hasn't always been kind to recipients of this award in the past. As predicted back in the autumn, an earlier Pulitzer winner, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, generated no stir whatsoever upon its pre-Christmas debut at north London's Tricycle. An earlier Pulitzer victor, Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife - a portrait of the German transsexual, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf - closed within weeks of its 2005 West End debut.
August: Osage County, by contrast, thinks as big as those two plays thought small. Everything about its New York success has flouted convention. For one thing, it's a true ensemble (13 in all) in a theatrical capital generally enslaved to stars. The Steppenwolf Theatre cast will surely land Tony award triumphs for Amy Morton and Rondi Reed in the leading and supporting actress categories.
Although the play is transferring later this month to the smaller Music Box Theatre next door, its high-profile perch at the Imperial - a capacious venue soon to host the American stage premiere of Billy Elliot: The Musical - has shown its producers' commitment to such material at a time when impresarios on both sides of the Atlantic prefer tidy plays with small casts. By way of proof, consider Thurgood, the solo play with Laurence Fishburne playing the African-American Supreme Court Justice and opening up the street from August: Osage County later this month.
