Bleader: In 2007, Chicago-based actress Deanna Dunagan appeared in the original Steppenwolf Theatre production of Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, stunning everybody with her performance as Violet Weston—the foul-mouthed ("Why don't you go fuck a fucking sow's ass?"), savage ("I'll eat you alive, girl!"), drug-addled ("Gizza cig . . . some cigezze? Cig-zezz, cig-zizz, cig-zuhzzz") matriarch of a monumentally dysfunctional Oklahoma family. Later that year the production moved to Broadway and Dunagan won a best-actress Tony Award. This week she opened at Goodman Theatre as the more genteel but equally formidable mama Polly Wyeth. In Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, Polly runs a prominent, west-coast Republican family with significant baggage. Our conversation is offered in two installments. In this first one, Dunagan sweetly but firmly disabuses me of a lot of misconceptions regarding Baitz's play and her character.
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