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August: Osage County

• Written by Tracy Letts
• Directed by Anna D. Shapiro
• Starring Estelle Parsons
• At the Canon Theatre in Toronto

August: Osage County is an all-you-can eat buffet of theatre, with 12 vivid characters tearing at each other over three and a half hours of viciously funny family drama.

When it opened in New York in 2008, Broadway audiences who hadn't even realized they'd been starving on a diet of appetizers and empty calories came out feeling full and satisfied – and Tracy Letts's play went on to win the Tony and the Pulitzer.

As it turns out, the feast that is August: Osage County is a movable one, as delicious in the Steppenwolf tour that has touched down at the Canon Theatre in Toronto as it was on the Great White Way.

While I was fully expecting to find the show a little dull on repeat, the biggest compliment I can give the play and this production is that I laughed harder and winced more the second time around through.

Letts's Weston clan are the latest in a long line of dysfunctional families to bring their feuds to the American stage. As the play begins, they have congregated at the family home in rural Oklahoma after the disappearance of patriarch Beverly (Jon DeVries), a once promising poet who long ago chose Dubonnet over sonnets.

Violet Weston (Estelle Parsons) is in a state, but then she usually is – undergoing treatment for mouth cancer, she's fallen back on an old drug dependency and is awash in Valium, Vicodin, Percodan, Percocet and Xanax, to name just a few.

This raging granny's favourite sport is attacking and belittling her three daughters: Barbara (Shannon Cochran), the eldest, arrives with her pot-smoking 14-year-old daughter and separated husband Bill; Ivy (Angelica Torn), the unhappy middle child who has grudgingly stayed close to home; and Karen (Amy Warren), the flakey youngest, who shows up with a dubious fiancé in tow.

Also filling the three-storey house, masterfully designed by Todd Rosenthal, are Violet's almost-as-wicked sister Mattie Fae (Libby George), her generous-spirited husband Charlie and their ne'er-do-well son, Little Charles.

There's a family tree in the program to keep track of everyone – but the play is clear and well written, so there's never any confusion.

Ultimately, August: Osage County – it's late summer and the house is located in Osage County; that's all the perplexingly pretentious title is, a dateline – boils down to two women facing off: Violet, cruel and unruly, and Barbara, who is more of a chip off the old block then she'd like to admit.

Parsons is the ultra-Violet, switching from mean to self-pitying on a dime, slurring and sloshing herself all over the house in an intense performance that would be exhausting for anyone, let alone an 81-year-old actor.

And Cochran gives a fierce performance as Barbara, whose fury and sharp wit masks love and longing. She gets most of the best lines, including a biting rant about the Greatest Generation and “eat the fish, bitch,” which you'll have to hear in context to understand why it brings down the house.

This ensemble from Chicago's lauded Steppenwolf theatre is fine across the board – DeVries's Beverly is a little overly affected, but quickly disappears. There is plenty to nitpick about in the script and the staging, however. It's a shame the actors are miked and especially that the Broadway staging hasn't been adapted to reflect that. A dinner scene that was already obscured due to some willfully naturalistic staging by director Anna D. Shapiro becomes even more confusing due to the disembodied, directionless voices.

But the bigger the canvas, the more likely there is to be something askew.

And, overall, August: Osage County satisfies and entertains in way that only a large ensemble drama can.

Letts's play ponders the idea that perhaps family is a myth as threadbare as that of the United States of America itself. But the actual shape of the show dispels that argument – we are bigger and better together, even when we're at each others' throats.

August: Osage County runs until Nov. 15.