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Pamela Rabe stars in Black Swan State Theatre Company production August: Osage County at Perth Festival 2025

Synchronicity in the world of theatre is a wonderful gift. Like the moment when August: Osage County opened at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre last November in the same week as the US presidential election. Many questioned if it was deliberate programming by director Eamon Flack, but in all honesty, the season was the serendipitous combination of him wanting to direct American playwright Tracy Letts’ 2008 Pulitzer and Tony award-winning play, and actor availability. Casting included indomitable stage and screen actor Pamela Rabe as opiate-addicted matriarch Violet Weston, whose alcoholic poet husband Beverly goes missing, resulting in their three adult daughters descending on the Pawhuska, Oklahoma family home with their own spouses and children. This tinderbox of dark secrets and unfinished business has had audiences on the edge of their seats since Oklahoma-born Letts penned his play for Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theatre Company — he is also an actor and part of the Steppenwolf ensemble — where it premiered in 2007 before opening on Broadway later that year. Set in 2007, in the county named after Osage First Nations people, the play leans heavily on the legacy of great American playwrights Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard. “At the time it was written, yes it felt like a metaphor for America, but very much about America’s relationship with its land and its original inhabitants,” Rabe says. “This was the land where 30 million bison roamed until European settlers wiped them out and took the land away and pushed the Indigenous nations out of their own place and plunked them in reservations. “Now it even more strongly feels like a bigger statement about the dissipation of the American dream. It has got another level of resonance, particularly with current events.” It was a reunion for Rabe and Flack, who had previously collaborated on productions including Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Her immediate agreement to do the play when Flack asked was for two reasons, partly for its greatness — Rabe had seen it on Broadway, along with two other versions in Australia — and because it meant she would be working with a large cast. “It’s such a rare event now in Australian theatre,” the 65-year-old actor says. “We are so financially constrained in the arts, so under-supported, and where you see cuts made it’s usually just in what gets put on the stage. So often now I’m doing solo-performance plays, or two or three-actor plays, so to be sharing a stage with 12 other actors is such a special event.” The Belvoir St Theatre season proved so popular it was extended and went on to win best mainstage production at the 2024 Sydney Theatre Awards in January, ahead of the Black Swan State Theatre Company’s upcoming co-production season at Perth Festival 2025. Flack was also honoured for best direction of a mainstage production, and a double award for best performance in a leading role in a mainstage production went to Rabe and Tamsin Carroll, who played eldest daughter Barbara (the role taken over by Hayley McElhinney in Perth). “It was a very special experience and it’s an extraordinary production of a particularly consummately made play,” Rabe says of the award recognition. “It was daunting because it required a kind of verbal dexterity, and almost a kind of musical flexibility from a very large cast. A normal play would be maybe 90-100 pages long when you receive a script. “This play was 185 pages. They’re such verbal characters, they speak a mile a minute, their mouths are their rapiers. “So you have to wrap your brain and your lips around some extraordinary text. “As we were working on it in the rehearsal room, we knew that was exciting, but we kind of had our heads down, bums up, just trying to get on top of it. “We can take some credit for it as a cast, and Eamon Flack our director who crafted it. But really, in the end, what you’re feeling is how this play works on an audience. “It is so thrilling. It is so exciting. There’s something that happens in the way the second act of this three-act play finishes that unleashes a roar from an audience that I’ve never heard in my entire career, and I’ve been doing this now for over 40 years.” Born in Ontario, Canada, Rabe was the seventh of eight children to civil engineer father William and busy homemaker mother Reta who nurtured a household full of musicians and storytellers. While helicopter parenting was yet to be a term, Rabe’s place at the bottom of the family pecking order meant it was never an issue anyway. “By that time, my parents had just run out of energy, so most of my role modelling and parenting in a kind of concrete sense was being done by my older siblings, but certainly the influence of my parents was very strong,” she says. “One of my strongest early memories was realising that we now had somebody for every day of the week for all the chores that we had to do. I have great memories of singing at the top of our lungs and washing up dishes.” All her siblings were great storytellers, but Rabe was the only one to pursue an acting career, crediting a series of enlightened teachers who unlocked something that led her to Playhouse Acting School in Vancouver. It was be a decision that changed her life in multiple ways, meeting Australian director Roger Hodgman, who had worked at Vancouver Playhouse, and moving to Melbourne with her future husband when he secured a job at the Victorian College of the Arts. “I was in my early 20s, just graduated from acting school, and had all sorts of possibilities of where I could go and paths that I could take, and I chose that one,” the Tasmania-based Rabe says. It resulted in establishing a celebrated career across theatre, film (Sirens, Paradise Road, Cosi) and television (Wentworth, Deadloch), and being awarded the Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her distinguished services to the arts in 2023. Trained for live performance, Rabe says she has no particular preference between stage and screen, which has perhaps been part of the key to her successful career in Australia’s small industry. “To survive, you really have to be able to do everything,” she says. “But it’s also about where the stimulation is, because you want work that keeps you on your toes.” No stranger to Perth Festival audiences, having performed in Sydney Theatre Company’s The War Of The Roses with Cate Blanchett at His Majesty’s Theatre in 2009, August: Osage County will mark Rabe’s debut on the Heath Ledger Theatre stage. Alongside Bert LaBonte (Cloudstreet, Colin From Accounts, The Newsreader), the remaining original Sydney cast will be joined by seven local Perth actors, including McElhinney, Caroline Brazier, and Geoff Kelso. “Violet Weston is an extraordinary character. I have in the past said she’s one of the great theatre monsters, and I think that’s true, but she’s also a character of deep pain and complexity,” Rabe says. “Violet and Barbara have a very close and toxic co-dependent relationship that is such a joy to play. To get in there and do that fencing match with another performer, I’m so looking forward to doing that with Hayley. “We’ve worked together quite a bit in the past, but not for a long time.” It is a mother-daughter relationship that was brought to life by Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in the 2013 film of August: Osage County, with the screenplay also written by Letts, but Rabe says the film is not a patch on what the play becomes inside a live performance. The work is very much a piece of storytelling meant for a theatre. “Its complexity of a sucker punch to head and heart is made for a theatre,” she says about the 3½-hour play with two intervals. “I would encourage audiences not to be daunted by the running time because I’ve had many people tell me they’ve never wanted to get back into a theatre from an interval break as quickly as with this play. “I think it’s because it’s absolutely packed. “There’s this parade of extraordinary family members who all congregate for an event that’s happened in the family, and everybody’s story is kind of touched on. “It goes by with such energy and detail and humour. “The experience of watching this play, it’s muscular.” August: Osage County is at Heath Ledger Theatre, February 27 to March 16. Tickets at blackswantheatre.com.au.

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Pamela Rabe stars in Black Swan State Theatre Company production August: Osage County at Perth Festival 2025

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Pamela Rabe stars in Black Swan State Theatre Company production August: Osage County at Perth Festival 2025