Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama as well as Tony Awards for
best play and best actor, Tracy Letts has emerged as one of the
greatest playwrights of the twenty-first century.Understanding
Tracy Letts, the first book dedicated to his writing, is an
introduction to his plays and an invitation to engage more deeply
with his work--both for its emotional power and cultural
commentary. Experiencing a Tracy Letts play often feels akin to
reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, watching a Cohen Brothers film,
and seeing an episode of Breaking Bad at the same time. His
characters can be ruthlessly cruel and funny, selfish and generous,
delusional and incisive, and deceptive and painfully honest. They
keep secrets. They harbor biases and misconceptions. And in their
quest to find love and understanding, they often end up being the
greatest impediments to their own happiness. As a writer, Letts can
move seamlessly from the milieu of a Texas trailer park to the
pulsating nightlife of London's countercultural scene, the stifling
quiet of small-town Ohio to the racial tensions of urban Chicago.
He thrives in the one-act format, in plays like Mary Page Marlow
and The Minutes, as well as the epic scope of August: Osage County
and Linda Vista. With a musician's sense of timing, Letts shifts
between humor and heartache, silence and sound, and the mundane and
the poetic. And he fearlessly tackles issues such as gender bias,
racism, homophobia, and disability rights. Contemporary American
life thus becomes a way to comment on the country's troubled
history from Native American genocide to the civil rights movement.
The personal narratives of his characters become gateways to the
political. Understanding Tracy Letts celebrates the range of
Letts's writing, in part, by applying different critical approaches
to his works. Whether through the lens of disability studies, the
conspiracy genre, food studies, the feminist politics of quilting,
or masculinity studies, these readings help bring out the thematic
richness and sociopolitical dimensions of Letts's work.
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