Tracy Letts: 'If you’re not entertaining, what the hell’s the point'

Chicago in January is a frozen city. The cars, white with opaque frost, roll very slowly, while the few solitary pedestrians, bent double against horizontal scouring winds, move very fast. And yet, says Tracy Letts, “in this weather, right now, people will go out tonight and see a play that they know nothing about, just because it’s a new play.”

Letts is the only person to have won both a Tony (for his performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway last June) and a Pulitzer Prize for his play August, Osage County. The latter has just been made into a movie with a formidably A-list cast including Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. Meanwhile Letts finds himself in the curious position of getting arraigned by strangers thanks to his recent turn on the TV show Homeland.

Nonetheless, he persists in identifying not just as “a theatre guy”, but a [ital] Chicago theatre [ital] guy.

On a quiet, suburban looking street, his home is a big modern edifice of windowless sand-coloured stone, straight lines and sharp angles.

Professionally obliged by the Weinstein Company to enter the pre-Oscars circus, Letts is just back from LA and reels off a list of who will win what next month, scoffing that it’s “so obvious”. (Twelve Years A Slave for Best Picture, Cate Blanchett for Best Actress, Chiwetel Ejiofor for best actor, and so on.) August, Osage County is itself up for two Academy Awards: Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts are nominated for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress but Letts speaks with the nonchalance of a man apart from it all. Is he experiencing a degree of detachment?

“I think it’s just too personal for me to ever feel detached, you know? It’s personal material and it still gets me when I watch it. I mean there’s a certain finality about a movie, when it’s done it’s done – that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There’s a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can’t do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participate.”

Letts came to Chicago in the summer of 1986, the same summer he turned 21 years old. When he found the Steppenwolf Theatre Company he felt embraced by a community as both an actor and playwright.

It was August Osage County, his fourth play, that sent his name far beyond the windy city. He calls it, “the “Big American Play”’ and one with, “big sloppy American feelings and history in it.” It’s also his most acutely personal. The Weston family, riven with bitterness, betrayals, delusions and lies, gather after Beverly Weston, their patriarch commits suicide. Violet, his foul-mouthed, cancerous wife is drawn in part from Letts’ own grandmother.

The play seems to have spun a sort of magic from its very first performance. “The audience just started to bubble with that feeling, of, ’we’re all in on this together.’” It sounds as if he believes there might just be something inherently more edifying about a good play, over a good movie.

“Well ... maybe,” he says, sounding gloomy. “It seems to me it’s harder to make a good play than it is to make a good movie. Right? ... Every word up there I wrote and I’m happy about that.” Yet: “I lost a lot. And I hated to lose a lot ... I hated to lose depth.”

Tracy’s own father played the role of Beverly Weston until, in January of 2008, he left the show, suffering from lung cancer. He died a month later, too soon to see his son win the Pulitzer and the Tony. “It’s Greek,” one of Letts’ friends told him, referring to this moment of extreme grief and extreme exultation.

^{Oscar nominated: Julianne Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Margo Martindale in a scene from August: Osage County}

With the Pulitzer came the invocation of names like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O‘Neill. “Great American Play” became a familiar epithet.“I’m not fit to lash Eugene O’Neill’s shoelaces,” he says. “At the same time, if you told me you have to go watch Long Day’s Journey Into Night or August, Osage County, I’m going to go see August, Osage County. Because there are no laughs in Long Day’s Journey Into Night – And I like a few laughs! The truth is, if you’re not entertaining, what the hell’s the point.”

Superior Donuts, which premiered at Steppenwolf in 2008 and which will open at London’s Southwark Playhouse next month, was meant to be, “an exercise in writing something not so goddamn personal.” August, Osage County, had, he says, “taken such a goddamn chunk out of me, I was like, Jesus, some of these other playwright write their play, stick it in an envelope and send it off to their agent and they’re done!’ And I thought, well I wonder if I can do that. Well,” he snaps, annoyed, “I can’t.”

The play takes place in a donut shop run by Arthur, a 59-year-old Polish American in a mixed neighbourhood of Chicago. Franco Wicks, an ebullient 21-year-old black man, and the third hunted young man in trouble to appear in Letts’ work, talks Arthur into giving him a job. Then he presents him with a manuscript – The Great American Novel, he says, written by him. Does he believe in “The Great American Novel” as a concept?“I believe in the attempt,” Letts says. “I believe in the idea of it. I don’t think it gets written very often. And does he think a 21-year-old could write it?“No,” he says. “I don’t.”

As for why he writes for theatre rather than TV: “I respond to heat. And blood. And humanity. The cold experience is not for me. I’ve always enjoyed all the real people in a room together in the theatre. ”

^{Mandy Patinkin and Tracy Letts in Homeland}

Perhaps ironically, it was his Broadway debut, in all the bloody heat and humanity of an Edward Albee play, that sent him to the “cooler” world of television. Alex Ganza, the creator of Homeland, caught his acclaimed performance in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and cast him in Homeland.

Letts originally turned Ganza down.“By god there’s no better feeling in the world than turning down work, it’s a great, great feeling,” he booms, growing expansive. “As a broke-ass actor most of my life I’ve not been in that position so the last few years being able to do that feels great.”

He came around after Ganza persuaded him that his character’s confrontation with Mandy Patinkin’s Saul would stand for greater conversation about,”our secret service and the way they behave in the real world.”“I just wanted to work with a guy who was thinking along those lines, a guy who wasn’t just making a spy show for TV but was thinking about the bigger world and that his show had some kind of responsibility to it. People come up and say, ’I hate you!’ or, ’you’re such a bastard on Homeland!’ The reach of it amazes me.

Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to Billie, a bestselling novelist and Dennis, a college professor and actor. They were liberal parents, unbothered by their son’s appetite for horror.“I’ve had a pretty macabre sense of humour for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I got in trouble for having a copy of Clockwork Orange in my desk when I was 14 -years-old. I was a weird teenager”Did he have any comrades in weirdness?

“Not a lot,” he says glumly. “I was growing up in a small town in southeastern Oklahoma. Twelve thousand people. There wasn’t a lot of outlet for that kind of stuff. My grandfather, the one who committed suicide, took me and my brother to see a double feature at the drive-in of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Dracula Has Risen From The Grave – that’s one of the cultural high points of my life.”

That suicide, which happened when he was 10 years old, was the kernel for August, Osage County, a story that he’d wanted to tell for a long time.“I’m not an easy person. I’ve had years of therapy. I was a troubled young man, I’ll put it that way.”

He often shocks himself while writing – not something that happens to him while acting. There’s a moment in his first play, the “trailer-park noir” Killer Joe, in which the title character forces a woman into a simulated sex act, choking her until she vomits.

Letts confesses he has no idea where something like that comes from. While watching rehearsals he was so disturbed by this scene that he had to leave the theatre. I ask him whether writing things as black as this ever feels dangerous.“I do know what you mean and in some ways I think it’s kind of the opposite – you’ve just got to get the censor out of your head. You’ve got to get rid of that voice and write whatever’s bothering you. I never know what the hell I’m writing about, I never know what the next thing I’m writing about is, I never have a plan.”

He is about to star on Broadway opposite Parker Posey in The Realistic Joneses, a new play by Will Eno. I ask him what’s exciting him culturally right now “The other night I was watching one of the awards shows with my friend Bob. I wasn’t aware that I was being particularly critical or sardonic but a trailer came on for the new Muppet movie and I laughed and Bob turned to me and said, ’see? There’s something you like!’ And I felt awful! I thought, I’ve become this grumpy guy who doesn’t like anything.”

When I ask him if he feels pessimistic about America (or indeed everything) he answers with gusto: “Sure! Sure I do!” But then adds, with a big grin: “I’m kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.”

Superior Donuts opens at the Southwark Playhouse on Feb 11. Tickets: 020 7407 0234; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk