Tracy Letts, of the Chicago company Steppenwolf, has written one of the best plays of the past ten years. August: Osage County is an exhilarating, multilayered family drama whose sweep and power amazed everyone who saw it on stage. His 2008 play, Superior Donuts, has a smaller, cosier canvas. We’re on the north side of Chicago in a doughnut bar run by an ageing hippie named Arthur. Yes, doughnuts. In a world seized with dietary paranoia, this long-haired old dreamer is trying to peddle wheat-based, starch-ridden, gluten-crammed, sugar-encrusted spheres of death. That’s Arthur in shorthand, stodgy and moribund.
His donkeyish life is perked up by the arrival of Franco, a chatty young black dude, who needs a job and a publisher for his novel. But Franco is carrying some bad debts from his gambling days and he’s being hounded by a pair of very polite gangsters. All this detail takes over an hour to unfold, and the action is broken up with irrelevant bittersweet scenes involving gormless cops and a motor-mouthed Russian neighbour who wants to become a millionaire.
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