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. His heavily accented monologues are supposed to be gauche, quirky and hilarious. And they nearly are.
The play’s stagecraft, borrowed from Chekhov, works very well. The studied languor, the loose ends left flapping, the general free-flowing untidiness of the piece are admirable. But flaws remain. Arthur keeps breaking the fourth wall to wallow in his woe-stricken back story as a draft-dodger who was forced into exile in Canada. In the second act there’s a bareknuckle fight between Arthur and one of the gangsters with the comedy Russian serving as umpire. That’s bananas. And it’s impossible to stage convincingly. And Franco’s novel, of which only one copy exists, suffers a predictable fate.
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