In the movie of August: Osage County, the bravura exhibition of monstrousness and hurt by the all-star cast—Streep and Roberts in particular—is getting all the attention. And rightly so. I laughed in terror. But I was also struck by the classical frame: that big, isolated house, long past its prime.
150 years after A Month in the Country, the country-house play thrives, and accommodates people and goings-on that Turgenev would not have believed.
The formula is straightforward: characters show up and hang around—and consequently make nice, fight, flirt, and air dirty laundry. Though they may be related, they shouldn’t be cohabitating. After many demonstrations of mutual incompatibility, most of the characters flee.
That’s about all there is in terms of action. As a genre, it’s the complimentary opposite of the detective story, which originated around the same time. The same gradual exposure of the real relations between an oddly sorted little community. But, as in Turgenev, there’s no solution, no end. Things go on.
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