How playwrights resolve the problem of backstory

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: “Father died just a year ago, on this very day — the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.” Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are.

Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new Native-American hire, Johnna, the basic setup: “My wife takes pills and I drink.”

This bald structure is “concealed” by digressions about John Berryman, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane — Beverly is a failed poet — but they are flagrant cover-ups, toupées, merkins, hairpieces. Of course, alcohol is indiscreet, so a further strategy is overload. We find out that Violet, Beverly’s wife, takes “Valium. Vicodin. Darvon, Darvocet. Percodan, Percocet. Xanax for fun. OxyContin in a pinch. Some black Mollies once, just to make sure I was still paying attention. And of course Dilaudid. I shouldn’t forget Dilaudid.”

In Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes, Piet Bezuidenhout tells his wife Gladys how he became involved in the black protest movement. It’s a two-page speech. When I interviewed Fugard in August 1980, I asked about the mixture of naturalism and characters reliving memories.

For example, in The Blood Knot, it is unlikely that Zach wouldn’t have already told his brother exactly what it was like to work on the gate. Fugard replied: “I had the same problem in A Lesson from Aloes: Piet launches into the story of how he first met Steven [a black activist] and the specifics of that [bus] boycott, how he, at a very arid point in his life, suddenly found himself caught up. And, surely to God, he’s told Gladys that story many times. All he needs actually is a few allusions to it, and I’ve plonked down a very long monologue. Well, one of two things: that’s either valid dramatic licence or bad dramaturgy. And there is the possibility that it’s the latter: as a director, I must reckon with that possibility. I must try to disguise it by motivating the character so that, even if the story has been told five times, there is a compulsion in him.”

Disguise is the key. When Piet’s mentally frail wife tells us (and her husband) how violated she was when the security police read (and confiscated) her intimate diaries, the potential objection — that he has heard all this before — is defused by Piet’s acknowledgment: “[His desperation growing] I remember it very clearly, my love! I was here! With you!”

Though I’ve criticized the opening of August: Osage County, the rest of Letts’s play is exemplary in its disclosure of backstory. This is a play in which family secrets and revelations occur on a lavish scale. But how do you manage family members telling other family members things you might assume they already know?

For a start, the family haven’t met for some time:

MATTIE FAE (Still to Jean): My gosh, you’re so big! And look at your big boobs! They’re so big! Last time I saw you, you looked just like a little boy!

Jean has to fill in the conveniently ignorant Johnna, as they share a pipe of marijuana: “He and Mom are separated right now… He’s fucking one of his students which is pretty uncool, if you ask me.” Marijuana, like alcohol, loosens the tongue.

Elsewhere, the transmission of information is cunningly overlaid with uncertainty:

KAREN: I don’t know how well you remember Andrew…

BARBARA: No, I remember.

KAREN: That’s the best example: here’s a guy I loved so intensely…

The momentum of her narrative is unstoppable. The details are sketchy:

BARBARA: It’s in Sarasota?

KAREN: Miami. Didn’t you know I moved to Miami?

BARBARA: Wait, yes, I did know that –

KAREN: That’s where Steve’s business –

BARBARA: – right, right.

How exact this disruption is in its inexactitude. Letts’s dialogue is eerily accurate:

VIOLET: And my toenails, good God, anymore they could dig through cement.

And when Violet is under the influence of opiates, authentic intoxicated malapropisms: “I dig in call them.” (“I didn’t call them.”)

Violet tells a story about Beverly publicly fouling himself, through drink, while attempting to give a speech. Barbara comments: “Yeah, I can’t imagine why no one told that story.” A final example: when Violet goes into hospital to detox she has concealed Darvocet.

BARBARA: You remember when we checked her in the psych ward, that stunt she pulled?

IVY: Which time?

KAREN: I wasn’t there.

BARBARA: Big speech, she’s getting clean… She made this speech to us while she was clenching a bottle of pills in her cooch, for God’s sake.

KAREN: God, I never heard that story.

IVY: Did you just say “cooch?”

And then the beautiful, irrelevant distraction follows, as the family discusses alternative options: pussy, vagina, beaver, box. Noise.

These are resourceful solutions to the problem of backstory. Another way is to refuse backstory altogether. Which may be how you arrive at absurd drama.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.