Estelle in August: Estelle Parsons Plays Violet Weston
by Chad Jones

Talk about opposites: Estelle Parsons, the actress, couldn't be more different from Violet Weston, the character she plays in Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County.

Violet, in her mid-60s, has raised three daughters in Oklahoma and become a mean, bitter woman who has retreated from the world and spends her days dispensing venom and numbing herself with pills popped like Tic Tacs.

Parsons, on the other hand, is 81 and more active than ever. She took over the role of Violet from Tony-winner Deanna Dunagan and played it from June 2008 until May of this year. The 3-hour-20-minute play asks her to climb more than 350 stairs on the three-story set, dance to an Eric Clapton tune, smoke and, essentially, rip her family to shreds. And as for pills, Parsons says she doesn't even take aspirin.

With the help of a rigorous physical regimen that involves swimming, weight lifting and occasional bike riding, Parsons found she was more than up to the challenges presented by the play and is now taking Violet on the road.

While the Broadway production of August closed at the end of June, the national tour, headed by Parsons, opens in Denver and plays San Francisco's Curran Theatre August 11 through September 6 (how appropriate to have August in August) as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season.

From the Upper West Side apartment she shares with her husband, lawyer Peter Zimroth, Parsons says nobody asked her to go on tour.

"I think it's a terribly exciting thing to do," she says. "I told them, 'If you tour, I'd like to do it.' It's important to be all over America with great pieces. The country is so large and there's no national theatre. This is a very difficult play, and my daughter said, 'Mom, you're so brilliant in this play. You need to have as many people see it as possible.'"

An Academy Award winner for her role as Clyde Barrow's sister-in-law in Bonnie and Clyde, Parsons has had a distinguished career on the stage, with over 25 starring roles to her credit and Tony nominations for The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968), And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little (1971), Miss Margarida's Way (1978, her last time on tour) and Morning's at Seven (2002, her last appearance on Broadway prior to August).

Encouraged by her friends and fellow actors Laurie Metcalf and Rondi Reed (another Tony winner for August), Parsons went to the Music Box Theatre to see the play and to check out the role of Violet. Frankly, Parsons says, she didn't get it.

"I didn't know what the heck it was about," she says. "What amazed me was the audience. They were the third party in all of this because they were so active and dynamic. White audiences usually just sit there and watch, but with this one they play their role. That's exciting. I know the play is about family, and people respond to that. I was raised with first-generation Swedes and melancholy New England Protestants in Massachusetts. Where I come from, family is what you get away from. I didn't respond to the play in terms of family. I guess that's something peculiar in my makeup. Maybe my family didn't interest me enough or maybe I'm too self-obsessed. I can't really say. But I didn't get it."

Though Parsons has never wanted for work--her jobs have been as diverse as serving as artistic director for the Actors Studio for five years to playing Roseanne's mother on the sitcom Roseanne--she insists she would never take a job just for money.

"I'd rather starve," she says. "But I've managed to work enough to eat. I have never cared to amass money or be famous--the things most people are interested in. I like to do what's interesting to me at any given time--whatever's challenging. Some like rock climbing, but I'm not interested in life-or-death athletics. I am into life-or-death acting, the sublimation of life-and-death athletics."

Dunagan, the original Violet, left the company just before she won a Tony in 2008, citing exhaustion. Parsons says she understands how that might happen, but she's managing--and that's the challenge she savors.

"I've never taken a contract for more than four months," she says. "This is a tough play, and I've been doing it for about a year. Even though the play doesn't look deep, it's very funny, and to play it properly, you have to reach deep inside. People get burnt out doing it because you have to go for broke. That's the wonderful thing, the thing I like."

Though she didn't have the luxury of a long rehearsal period or one-on-one time with Tony-winning director Anna D. Shapiro, Parsons managed to make the role her own. She did get to have a conversation with playwright Letts, but Parsons only had one question for him: What's in the all-important letter Violet receives? Letts's answer, according to Parsons: "I don't know."

Critics lavished praise on Parsons. In the New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote: "All the hallmarks of Violet's character--the implacable cruelty, the shrill self-pity, the wily manipulation and the will of iron--are present and accounted for in Ms. Parsons' superb performance…The challenge of embodying this complicated, terrifying woman seems to burn away the years; if I didn't know Ms. Parsons was 80, I would never believe it. I hope she's having the time of her life. She is certainly giving a performance to remember, one that may prove to be a crowning moment in an illustrious career."

"I'm happy doing this play," Parsons says, "but I don't feel like I'm doing anything ground shaking."

Ask Parsons about the state of Broadway these days and she recalls her heyday of going from one Broadway show to another. Then the really interesting work shifted to off-Broadway and a whole generation of bona fide Broadway stars was replaced with people who act on stage when they don't have TV or film jobs.

"Basically, people don't work in the theatre anymore," Parsons says. "You get young people with MFAs, and they're in theatre until they get a TV job. Or they realize they can't make a living in New York. It's a tough life, and nobody seems to want to bite the bullet anymore."

People, Parsons says, seem to want a soft life these days.

"All anybody talks about is how hard I work," she says. "What else do you do with your life? I love it. My grandson [Eben Britton] just went into the NFL with the Jacksonville Jaguars. I was so appalled by that. I said to my daughter Abby, 'How can he do that, live such a terribly difficult, punishing life?' The answer was: he loves it. I could relate to that. In the NFL, like in theatre, you lose your love for it, you don't go on. Maybe people lose their love for theatre."

Parsons, rest assured, is far from losing her love of the theatre and is anxious to hit the road. Having described August: Osage County as akin to "Restoration comedy or French farce," Parsons calls the show "more like a phenomenon than a play" and says she looks forward to riling up audiences.

"The audience just goes great guns in this play," she says, "and that's heaven on Earth for someone in the theatre. That's what it's supposed to be: passion, plank and audience."

August: Osage County runs August 11 to September 6 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Visit shnsf.com for information.

Chad Jones is a Bay Area theatre writer. Reach him at chiatovich@gmail.com.