Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an accomplished American playwright, actor, and screenwriter, known for his powerful and often darkly comic works that explore complex family dynamics and societal issues. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in a family of educators, Letts's upbringing influenced his creative pursuits. He initially pursued acting in Dallas before relocating to Chicago, where he became a prominent member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Letts is celebrated for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play *August: Osage County*, which delves into the toxic relationships of the Weston family, drawing from his own family experiences. His earlier works, such as *Killer Joe* and *Bug*, often confront themes of violence, addiction, and the struggles of marginalized characters. In addition to his theatrical accomplishments, Letts has made significant contributions to film and television, appearing in notable series like *Homeland* and films like *The Big Short*. He has received numerous accolades, including Tony Awards for both acting and playwriting, solidifying his position as a significant figure in contemporary American theater. Letts continues to create thought-provoking works that resonate with audiences, reflecting the complexities of human existence.
Tracy Letts
- Born: July 4, 1965
- Place of Birth: Tulsa, Oklahoma
- Place of birth: Tulsa, Oklahoma
Biography
Tracy Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in Durant, the youngest of three sons, in an academic family. Letts spent a brief period at Southeastern Oklahoma State University but dropped out to pursue an acting career, moving to Dallas. Eventually, he settled in Chicago and became a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
Early Life
Both of Lett’s parents taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State. His father, Dennis Letts, who died in 2008, was an English professor turned actor. His mother, Billie Letts, who died in 2014, was a journalism professor and the author of the bestselling novels Where the Heart Is (1998) and The Honk and Holler Opening Soon (1998), and other works.
Letts has characterized his childhood in the small, rural college town as somewhat unhappy. As a scrawny, bookish, unpopular youngster, he was subjected to bullying. After dropping out of college at eighteen, Letts moved to the nearest big city, Dallas, where he pursued an acting career but mostly waited tables for two years. He then relocated to Chicago, where he also began writing for the stage. He moved to Los Angeles at the age of thirty-two and lived there for four years. Although he found some work as a television actor on shows such as Seinfeld and Judging Amy, Letts grew disillusioned and returned to Chicago. His success acting in a production of Glengarry Glen Ross persuaded Letts that his true vocation was in theater. He went on to act in a number of plays put on by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company before he received an invitation to join the ensemble in 2002.
Letts has received numerous writing and acting awards. His play Man from Nebraska was nominated for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in drama and his play August: Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award. Letts also won the 2013 Tony Award for best actor in a play for his performance, which represented his Broadway debut, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Letts has also acted in a recurring role on the television series Homeland.
Creative Life
Letts inherited his love of the arts from his father, who retired early from academia to pursue an acting career, inspiring his son to seek a similar path. Letts wrote his first creative story at the age of six. Entitled "The Psychopath," the tale told of a man who hanged himself and shot himself in the head.
Letts started writing his first play Killer Joe in 1990. However, no company showed interested in staging the graphically violent drama about a murder-for-hire scheme. In 1993 Letts produced the play himself with some actor friends. It proved a success, and actor Steve Martin, in one of whose comedies Letts had had a small role, funded its production overseas after the play was accepted at a film festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. This led to subsequent acclaimed productions in London and New York.
Letts’s next play, Bug, made its world premiere in London in 1996 and was later staged in New York. Letts focused primarily on his acting career until 2003 when Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company put on The Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama.
Steppenwolf also staged Letts’s next play, which is also his most widely acclaimed. August: Osage County, a darkly comic family drama with strong autobiographical overtones, won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Tony Award for best play. Superior Donuts made its world premiere at Steppenwolf in 2008 before moving to Broadway in 2009. Also in 2009, Letts’s adaptation of Three Sisters premiered in Portland, Oregon. Mary Page Marlowe additionally premiered at Steppenwolf in 2016, followed by Linda Vista in early 2017. Letts also wrote the comedic drama The Minutes, which opened on Broadway in 2022. The play was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2018 and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2022. The Broadway play also raised more than one hundred thousand dollars for Save the Children's Ukraine Relief Fund.
In addition to plays, Letts has written a number of screenplays, including those for the film versions of Bug (2006); Killer Joe (2011), which starred Matthew McConaughey; and August: Osage County (2013), which featured Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep. Streep’s performance in August: Osage County earned her an Oscar nomination. He wrote the screenplay for Netflix's The Woman in the Window (2021), starring Amy Adams.
While Letts continued to work in the world of theater, including writing Mary Page Marlowe, by 2016 his acting career in Hollywood had taken off further as well. In addition to an appearance in the Academy Award–winning film The Big Short (2015), he had a role as the university dean in the independent film Indignation in 2016. That same year, he played Deputy Narcotics Director John Finlator in the film Elvis & Nixon. At the same time, though he was only slated to appear in one episode, his role was expanded and he appeared in ten episodes of the first season of the HBO drama Divorce, starring Sarah Jessica Parker. In 2018, Letts starred in the second season of The Sinner, opposite Bill Pullman and Carrie Coon, Letts' wife. He also assumed the role of Los Angeles Lakers' coach Jack McKinney in the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. Letts also starred in the film Deep Water (2022) with Ben Affleck and the drama Eric Larue along with Alexander Skarsg. In 2024, Letts starred in McVeigh, a film about US veteran Timothy McVeigh, who was one of the domestic terrorists responsible for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. During the same year, Letts assumed the role of Herb Sargent, a writer, in the film Saturday Night Live.
Personal Life
Letts married actor Carrie Coon in 2013. They have two children.
Major Works
Letts’s plays focus on dark themes of rage, jealousy, deception, betrayal, violence, and addiction. His rough-hewn characters, most of whom are drawn from the margins of society, struggle to escape the confines of family and society with sometimes bleakly comic results. His plays are noted for their vernacular, sometimes raw dialogue.
Letts has stated that he wrote his first play Killer Joe out of anger. Hostility infuses much of this work, which is replete with no-holds-barred violent and sexual content more commonly portrayed on screen than on stage. The explicit nature of the subject matter makes for, by design, a harrowing theatrical experience that has discomforted critics and audiences alike. With its exploration of the pathologies of a range of depraved characters, Killer Joe holds viewers hostage in their sordid world for the duration of the play much as the characters themselves are imprisoned in a hopeless cycle of poverty, perversion, and despair.
Letts sets the graphic and claustrophobic tone of what is to follow with the opening scene of the play when the protagonist, Chris, bangs on the door of his father’s Texas trailer in the middle of the night and his stepmother, naked from the waist down, lets in the enraged young man. Chris’s alcoholic mother has just thrown Chris out the house after he attacked her for selling his stash of drugs. Chris had been planning to sell the cocaine himself in order to settle a drug debt with some local thugs who are threatening to kill him.
Chris’s father, who despises his former wife as much as his son does, barely takes his eyes off the television he is perpetually watching when he lends his approval to Chris’s brutal scheme to come up with the cash. The two men conspire to murder Chris’s mother so that they can cash in on her life-insurance policy, the beneficiary of whom will be twenty-five-year-old Dottie, Chris’s developmentally delayed sister. Unwilling to kill her themselves, they decide to contract her murder out to the Killer Joe of the title, a corrupt police officer who moonlights as a hitman. Unable to come up with the fee Killer Joe demands up front, father and son decide to offer up the child-like Dottie for Joe’s perverse predation.
For all the depravity of its unredeemable characters, save Dottie, Killer Joe impressed some critics with its portrayal of its morally unmoored characters’ desperation to better themselves, albeit via morally despicable means. Joe masks his murderous and perverse nature behind an impeccably polite and cheerful facade. Chris confides that his plan, once he gets his hands on the insurance-policy money, is to start a new life, a motivation his father seconds in a twisted show of paternal support. If any slender chance of redemption exists, it belongs to Dottie, whose innocence offers the only sympathetic beacon in this sordid world before it closes tragically around her.
Like Killer Joe before it, Bug forces the audience into disconcerting proximity to a world of squalor, brutality, and madness. Also as in Killer Joe, the protagonist of Buginhabits the margins of Oklahoma society, this time not in a trailer park but in a seedy motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, where Agnes, a stressed-out cocktail waitress, seeks to ease her loneliness and anxiety with a steady indulgence in vodka and cocaine. Agnes has never recovered from the trauma of her child’s abduction a decade earlier and now must contend with her vicious former husband, newly released from prison and eager to resume his abusive, stalking ways.
The play explores the nebulous boundaries between anxiety and paranoia and sanity and delusion when the arrival of a mysterious stranger recasts Agnes’s already tenuous grip on reality. Peter is a homeless drifter, whom Agnes permits, out of pity, to crash on the floor and then in her bed. More than from their status as lovers, their closeness evolves from a gradually shared paranoia. A Gulf War veteran, Peter confides in Agnes his theory that, during his stay in an Army hospital, he was subjected to a nefarious CIA experiment that led to his internal and external infestation with blood-sucking aphids. Slowly and inexorably, Peter’s strange theory burrows its way into Agnes’s mind and becomes as firmly entrenched a part of her reality as the maddeningly itching bugs that are visible only to her and Peter, both of whom nonetheless break out in dramatic welts.
Agnes’s susceptibility to Peter’s addled worldview illustrates a larger commentary about the conspiracy-theory mindset deeply embedded in the margins of American culture. The need for clearly delineated answers and enemies creates a vulnerability to explanations that confound logic but offer an insane kind coherence. Agnes, and the mentality she represents, is desperately seeking reasons behind the calamities and chaos they perceive all around them; for them, the alternative explanation—that many of the tragedies that best the human condition are the product of random circumstances—represents a far more frightening proposition.
Peter’s fantasies, for all their unhinged paranoia, nonetheless allow a measure of resolution for Agnes, still reeling from the catastrophe of her child’s kidnapping from a supermarket years earlier. Bug portrays Agnes’s descent into madness with empathy. At the same time, the play offers a critique of the abuses of power that feed such delusions. Peter represents an extreme, pathological expression of a generally healthy suspicion about the motivations and actions of powerful entities such as the government and the military. Physically and emotionally damaged—like so many veterans of the Gulf War who returned home to a government and health system skeptical of the toll the war had taken on them—Peter offers a disquieting reminder of the indifference that breeds brokenness.
Man from Nebraska represents a sharp departure from the frenetic violence and societal outcasts that mark his previous plays. Nebraska’s protagonist Ken Carpenter is a middle-aged insurance-company owner leading a sedate and predictable existence with his wife of forty years, Nancy. Letts sketches out the ordinariness of their lives in brief scenes in which Ken and Nancy work, watch TV, attend their local Baptist church, and dutifully visit Ken’s elderly mother in a nursing home. Their interactions consist of mundane niceties ("How’s your steak?" "Good. Yours?") punctuated by silences.
Ken’s bland, orderly life dispensing insurance policies to others falls into crisis when he loses the assurance that has always acted as his guide: his faith. Ken’s weeping midnight confession of "I don’t believe in God" stuns his wife, daughter, and pastor, and calls into question the very foundation of his existence, including his marriage. As his last name, Carpenter, suggests, Ken must rebuild the foundation of a life he has lived in a largely unexamined manner. His crisis of faith—in God, in the purpose of his own lackluster, only partially realized life experience—pushes Ken to fulfill the quest he plaintively outlines to his wife. "I don’t understand the stars," he tells Nancy, "Is there anything you can do about that?"
Ken’s trip to London, which he undertakes to extricate himself from his familiar perspective, enables him to experience sexual variety, unexpected friendships across racial and generational lines, and an introduction to art via a free-spirited young sculptor, who helps Ken craft new contours to his life. By the time Ken returns home, his wife is the only character who holds out hope that he can resume his commitment to her and their previous life. The play concludes on a note of uncertainty for their future together, suggesting that unpredictability is an intrinsic feature of the human condition. Ken discovers that navigating this existential reality is mostly a solitary endeavor, made more bearable by the knowledge that others must struggle forward in a similar way.
August: Osage County is Letts’s most acclaimed play. Letts’s darkly comic take on the toxicity of the Weston family dynamic examines the cruelty and suffering engendered by poverty, drugs, deception, poor decisions, and cyclical resentments. Inspired by events and people in Letts’s own family history, it draws upon his boyhood recollections of his maternal grandfather’s suicide by drowning and his grandmother’s addiction to pills in the aftermath of that tragedy. Letts’s own father, an actor in his own right, played the role of the grandfather character on Broadway, before succumbing to lung cancer four months into the play’s run.
Following in the tradition of classic dysfunctional family dramas such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), August: Osage County dissects the origins and impact of behaviors family members seem powerless to stop across generations. Violet, the pill-addicted matriarch of the Weston clan, is herself the product of a materially and spiritually impoverished upbringing and has pathologically conflated her will to survive with a need to torment the extended family around her with the same kind of abuse and humiliation she experienced as a child.
Violet mercilessly attacks each character’s point of vulnerability, justifying her cruelty in the name of honesty: It is "just time," she snaps, "we had some truths told ’round here’s all." Violet’s beaten-down family absorb her lashes with a mixture of retaliatory rage and substance-fueled escapism. "My wife takes pills," Violet’s husband, crushed with resignation, explains before his suicide, "and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck."
The bargain Letts places under a microscope in August: Osage County extends beyond the irredeemably damaged Westons. The play also serves as an indictment of the forces that relegate some people to the margins of the American dream. It unravels the story of failed individuals who clearly bear responsibility for their life choices but also the failed systems that have poorly equipped them with the resilience necessary to negotiate the vicissitudes of the human condition. "Thank God we can’t tell the future," one of Violet’s daughters notes, "or we’d never get out of bed." The bleak humor Letts finds in his characters’ struggles to cope with their despair offers an antidote to the viciousness of Violet’s survival strategy.
Superior Donuts offers a tale of one man’s chance to redeem a life of broken dreams and another’s hope to realize a dream he is still formulating. The play's protagonist, Arthur Przybyszewski, is the downtrodden slovenly proprietor of a hardscrabble Chicago neighborhood bakery started by his father, who never forgave Arthur for dodging the Vietnam draft. Now a sixty-year-old hippie partial to marijuana, tie-dyed shirts, and wearing a scraggly gray beard and ponytail, Arthur is a man frozen in an inertia of indifference to the world that threatens to invade his torpor. Rejecting innovations that might allow his shop to stay afloat in the face of stiff competition from an adjoining Starbucks, Arthur laments, "It would interfere with my alone time."
Arthur’s passivity receives a jolt in the form of Franco, a young African American aspiring novelist, who convinces Arthur to hire him. Once they overcome their initial wariness, the two develop an unlikely friendship in which Franco’s irrepressible optimism counters Arthur’s dour conviction that "life isn’t just what you wish for." Franco, by contrast, reveals that his namesake is the football legend Franco Harris, whose extraordinarily lucky catch brought his team their first-ever Super Bowl win. Arthur finds it difficult to resist Franco’s naïve conviction that he has been born under a similarly lucky star.
Although Franco, at twenty-one, is young enough to be Arthur’s grandson and is still in need of wisdom and protection (his motivation for working in the donut shop stems from a debt he owes a couple of loan sharks), he emerges as more of a mentor to the aging Arthur than the other way around. His youthful energy and enthusiasm (captured in the title of his novel America Will Be) gradually inspire Arthur to invest in a stake in his own life. If the message of Man from Nebraska is that the presence of a fellow seeker, even if lost, at one’s side makes the search for meaning more bearable, Superior Donuts extrapolates that one step further; sometimes, the play suggests, the selfless desire to see others thrive, even in the absence of personal hope, can lend motivation and purpose to the most beleaguered of existences.
Bibliography
Friedkin, William. "Tracy Letts." Vanity Fair, 20 Dec. 2013, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/01/tracy-letts-august-osage-county. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
Hoby, Hermione. "Tracy Letts: 'If You're Not Entertaining, What the Hell's the Point.'" The Telegraph, 31 Jan. 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10607247/Tracy-Letts-If-youre-not-entertaining-what-the-hells-the-point.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
Ingram, Hunter. "Married Duo Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts on Landing Emmy Noms Together for ‘Gilded Age’ and ‘Winning Time’ ." Variety, 23 Aug. 2024, variety.com/2024/tv/awards/carrie-coon-tracy-letts-emmy-nominations-1236111045/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
Letts, Tracy. "Q & A: Tracy Letts." Interview by Katie Van Syckle. Rolling Stone, 11 Sept. 2013, www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/q-a-writer-tracy-letts-on-adapting-august-osage-county-to-film-20130911. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
Letts, Tracy. "Tracy Letts Is Still Haunted by His Past." Interview by Alex Witchel. The New York Times, 21 Mar. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/magazine/tracy-letts-is-still-haunted-by-his-past.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.
Rich, Katey. "Tracy Letts: 'August Osage County Has Always Only Ended One Way." The Guardian, 16 Jan. 2014, www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/16/august-osage-county-always-ended-one-way. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.