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"I drink," explains Beverly Weston (Jon DeVries), bourbon decorously in hand, "and my wife takes pills."

The pickled but venerable patriarch of this stately country house on the Oklahoma plains addresses a young American Indian woman named Johnna (DeLanna Studi), who sits opposite him in subservient but dignified silence. In terrible need of work, she answers his friendly questions politely and laconically, the two of them together recapitulating several hundred years of white men expounding freely before the necessarily constrained and calculated words of the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

Nonetheless, this has to be one of the more piquant job interviews she or anyone has had. "I do not drink," Beverly clarifies carefully, "because my wife takes pills." The words come in measured syllables and a voice just soft and sonorous and twangy enough to evoke the Southern man of literature long gone to seed. "As for whether my wife takes pills because I drink," he continues, "I learned a long time ago not to try to speak for my wife.

Damn straight. Violet Weston (Estelle Parsons) can definitely speak for herself. And her first line, hard on the heels of Beverly's and transcribed loosely as, "Hemmoolafarghba izzdisss humuh," lets us know that she certainly will — under circumstances of her choosing and in words all her own. Most of those are more articulate than her opening lines, uttered from deep within the fog of a prescription cocktail of pain killers and downers. That fog is never really impermeable to Vi, though, who boasts that nothing gets passed her in this house, and indeed nothing ever does, except all the people who might have loved her.

Violet — a name pretty like the flower, vivid and spectrum-topping like the color, and a horseshoe throw away from violent — stalks the stage like a force of nature in August: Osage County, Tracy Letts' 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning Broadway hit now gracing the Curran Theatre in SHN's Best of Broadway series. Violet is a moody indoor tornado, one minute doing the psych-ward shuffle, the next charging bull-like up the stairs — or standing stock-still in the middle of the living room like the patient, unfeeling eye of a killer storm.

There's the respect that has made the long calamity of the Weston household a lonely battlefield for two, at least until Beverly's disappearance brings their three daughters and their respective families or near-families back home in self-indulgent fits of mutual resentment, amends-making, and remorse. There's plenty of it all to go around. If there is a set assortment of possible ingredients in any classical family drama — a death, preferably stillborn or suicidal; an illegitimate child and or incest; drug addiction and or alcoholism; etc. — Letts has no shame in using them all. It's a potent concoction for black comedy.

Throughout it all is the deliciously corrupt and irresistible Violet, patrolling the full measure of her domain — a towering three-level house whose two-angle staircase and pointed rooftop attic form a crooked arrow up, as if tracing Beverly's last jag. It also points the way of his influence postmortem via his hire Johnna, whom he hands a volume of T.S. Eliot ...