Html">August: Osage County," his 2007 Broadway breakthrough, do much to advertise the charms of humanity, featuring as it did a hellish family that by the final curtain made the opening suicide seem inevitable. In "Night Safari," first performed in January 2018, Wilson plays Gary, the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever.
"The Old Country," written in 2015, is no less foxy; what seems at first like a simple lunchtime conversation between two codgers embodied by papier-mâché puppets moves quickly but without comment into another realm as you realize the men are talking at cross-purposes.
But Landy seems to have let go of his moorings, drifting on a sea of random and often inappropriate thoughts.
That impression is deepened by the choice to stage the piece, written for humans, with the puppets, which as rendered by Grace Needlman seem to generalize human experience instead of specifying it the way live actors do. You don't need to see a man getting married stage right to feel the punch of a line like "My Enormous Ego has stumbled badly and taken a terrific fall!"
Nor do you have to be a man, though Letts now seems to be our leading contender for bard of male moral decrepitude.
But now, taking on smaller slices of humankind, and leaving the big bad themes to speak for themselves, his vision seems funnier, deeper, bigger.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/theater/three-short-plays-tracy-letts-review.html
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