The late-life leading lady
At the age of 67, American actress Deanna Dunagan was living a comfortable life as a veteran player in the Chicago theatre scene when she took on the lead role in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of mammoth family drama August: Osage County three years ago.
Within a year of its debut, the Tracy Letts-penned play had gone to Broadway, won a Pulitzer Prize and swept the pool at the 62nd Tony Awards, with Dunagan singled out for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
“After 34 years in regional theatre, I never even thought about [being at the Tonys],” she marvelled in her acceptance speech. “I watched it on TV like everyone else.”
The eloquent Dunagan, who spoke to Sydney Star Observer from her home in Chicago ahead of Steppenwolf’s stint performing the play at the Sydney Theatre, couldn’t be further from the character that provided her with such an unexpected career high.
Dunagan plays Violet Weston, the bitter, drug-addled matriarch of a large Southern family that comes together after their beloved father disappears. In the sprawling, three-act play, Violet monsters her adult children to comic and devastating effect.
Amazingly, it’s a role she very nearly turned down.
“I just didn’t think I’d be able to do it, emotionally or physically, night after night, eight shows a week. I thought it would just be too difficult, because it’s so dark,” she said.
“But the writing is so seductive. The repartee, the brilliance of interchange, is so intoxicating. When you’re playing a scene with the other cast members, you can forget what a monster she really is — she doesn’t feel that she’s a monster.
“She feels, as addicts feel, that she is right. She insists that she is the truth-teller. The fact that she goes around destroying people is just the breaks.”
It seems that Dunagan would have to reach some level of empathy with her character, in order to so convincingly portray her on stage every night.
“I feel for the young Violet, for the child who is still inside the humanity of the woman. I feel sorry for what has happened to her. There were not that many opportunities for her growing up, and she didn’t have the chance to achieve very much.”
Such is its success, August is set to be made into a big-budget Hollywood film, with Julia Roberts one of the A-list names attached. Dunagan said she’d made peace with the fact that Violet will no doubt be played by an established film actress for the big-screen adaptation. To her, bringing the character on stage every night is pleasure enough.
“I just love to hear people’s reactions to Violet. I had a friend who came to the show with her daughters, and they asked me if I’d ever known anybody like Violet. I said I hadn’t and her daughter, this sweet little girl, said ‘You must not have known our grandmother’.
“So, you know, she’s around.”
info: August: Osage County plays at the Sydney Theatre until September 25. Visit www.sydneytheatre.com.au
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Deanna Dunagan plays a mother from hell in the award-winning August: Osage County. Photo: Michael Brosilow
