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The list of living playwrights who can sell a straight play on Broadway without a big-name Hollywood star these days is very short, indeed.

Alongside Tom Stoppard and David Mamet, we can tentatively pencil in Chicago playwright Tracy Letts of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

With 1993's violent and profane Killer Joe, Letts earned an early reputation as America's contributor to the in-yer-face theatre movement. But the Oklahoma-born playwright reached wider recognition with 2007's August: Osage County. A meaty and entertaining 3½ hours, this darkly comic drama about the deeply dysfunctional Weston family played for 648 performances on Broadway. His follow-up, the lighter Superior Donuts, opened on the Great White Way last month to strong reviews and is booking through to March.

Having won a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize and played Britain's National Theatre, August: Osage County gets its Canadian premiere this week as the Steppenwolf tour starring 81-year-old Oscar winner Estelle Parsons touches down in Toronto. From Chicago, Letts spoke to The Globe and Mail about his family epic's ongoing success.

Many critics have slotted August: Osage County into a tradition of American family drama that goes from Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night to Sam Shepard's Buried Child and beyond.

Sure. I've been involved in theatre since I was 15 years old as an actor, so I'm steeped in the language and literature of the theatre. To pretend that August is a play that is written in a vacuum would be disingenuous. There's not a lot of direct homage to other plays or playwrights and yet it is written with an awareness of what has come before me.

Why have so many American playwrights taken the family as their subject?

You know, the family - it's what we've got. It allows for an audience to make a very personal and very immediate connection. If you write an overtly political play, you may find a lot of people in the audience don't concern themselves with politics, therefore it won't strike them in that same personal way.

How much are the Westons a metaphor for America then?

The Brits wanted to make more a meal out of that than I would have liked. The play's not meant to function purely as metaphor. It's also meant to function as a drama with characters that we can get involved in - they're not all emblems of some larger idea. I think any play you write, though, you hope that there's some universality to it and it's not just about itself.

August: Osage County is partly based on your own family history. And there is a direct family connection to it: Your father, Dennis Letts, played the Weston patriarch, Beverly, then passed away during the Broadway run. All these connections must be emotionally exhausting to revisit - have you got tired of the play yet?

I don't know that I would say I'm tired of it. I feel that I had some things to say about my family and perhaps about families in general with August: O.C. and I've said them. The fact that my father was in the play, of course, also makes it deeply personal to me. But the fact that my father passed away during the creation of the play far outstrips, for me personally, the success or failures of the play or even the existence of the play. My father's death is a much bigger deal in my life than any play.

Both of your plays that have made it to Broadway have been directed by women. That should be an odd thing to point out, but it isn't. What effect do you feel working with female directors has had on your work?

I never noticed it until somebody pointed it out to me only upon going to New York. Here in Chicago, we have a lot of women directors and most of the directors that I've worked with both as an actor and as playwright are women. I didn't know it was a closed shop elsewhere. Gender never really enters into our discussions or into the dynamic.

I have read that August's director, Anna D. Shapiro, was slightly appalled by some of your earlier work, though. Specifically, I'm thinking of that scene involving fellatio and fried chicken in Killer Joe.

Let's face it: Killer Joe is a really strong cup of joe. It's not for everybody. Anna was a lot younger then, as was I, and who knows how she might react to it now. I don't even necessarily think that's a gender question as much as it is a matter of taste. Or, in this instance, her lack of it. She's one of the first people I gave the play to and, of course, she threw it across the room and said, "This is garbage. No one is going to do this." And you know, now it's been done all over the world, so she enjoys eating some crow about that.

For more with Tracy Letts on T.S. Eliot, colour-blind casting and writing for characters of diverse backgrounds, visit the Nestruck on Theatre blog at http://www.globeandmail.com/blogs/theatre.