The Minutes

by Tracy Letts

This scathing new comedy about small-town politics and real-world power, from the author of Osage County , exposes the ugliness behind some of our most closely-held American narratives while asking each of us what we would do to keep from becoming history's losers.
"Certain to be the single work of art that best represents, but will also survive, the Trump era." - Variety "Explosive... Deftly captures the tension of patriotic grandiosity and provincial defensiveness found in city halls across the land." - Chicago Tribune "Astonishing... a pitch-black comedy about the current state of American politics." - Chicago Sun-Times

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Fiction

73 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2024

About the author

Tracy Letts is an American playwright and actor who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County.

Letts was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma to best-selling author Billie Letts, of Where The Heart Is and The Honk And Holler Opening Soon fame, and the late college professor and actor Dennis Letts. His brother Shawn is a jazz musician and composer. He also has a brother Dana. Letts was raised in Durant, Oklahoma and graduated from Durant High School in the early 1980s. He moved to Dallas, where he waited tables and worked in telemarketing while starting as an actor. He acted in Jerry Flemmons' O Dammit!, which was part of a new playwrights series sponsored by Southern Methodist University.

Letts moved to Chicago at the age of 20, and worked for the next 11 years at Steppenwolf and Famous Door. He's still an active member of the Steppenwolf company today. He was a founding member of Bang Bang Spontaneous Theater, whose members included Greg Kotis (Tony Award-winner for Urinetown), Michael Shannon (Academy Award-nominee for Revolutionary Road), Paul Dillon, and Amy Pietz. In 1991, Letts wrote the play Killer Joe. Two years later, the play premiered at the Next Lab Theater in Chicago, followed by the 29th Street Rep in NYC. Since then, Killer Joe has been performed in at least 15 countries in 12 languages.

In 2008, Letts won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for August: Osage County. It had premiered in Chicago in 2007, before moving to New York. It opened on Broadway in 2007 and ran into 2009.

His mother Billie Letts has said of his writing, "I try to be upbeat and funny. Everybody in Tracy's stories gets naked or dead." Letts' plays have been about people struggling with moral and spiritual questions. He says he was inspired by the plays of Tennessee Williams and the novels of William Faulkner and Jim Thompson. Letts considers sound to be a very strong storytelling tool for theater.

Reviews

[Doug]

INNES: 'I love Abraham Lincoln. And violence.' p. 46.

This premiered 6 years ago but is only now being published - and even in that short time it has become a bit dated - the targets for the satire (basically the cheapening and moral collapse of politics since the advent of Felonious Chunk) are still operative and have probably even increased - but we've become inured to any humorous takes on such by the bombardment of insanity in politics over the past decade.

The play purports to show a city council meeting in a town called Big Cherry - the state isn't delineated, so as to not defame any one region; it could be practically anywhere, although I got a feeling it was somewhere in the east - or perhaps, given what happens, Florida. New member Mr. Peel has missed the previous meeting due to the death of his mother, and he is alarmed to find that in that session, fellow member Mr. Carp was summarily dismissed from his position and the minutes of said meeting have also been suppressed.

The set-up and underlying mystery are intriguing, but by the mid-way point, when people are screaming and getting into shoving matches, the whole thing has devolved into nonsensical chaos and loses any sense of reality - and one simply ceases to care much. And that weird ending also, as the reviews indicate, doesn't really stick the landing. Which is a shame, as Letts is one of our finest living playwrights and has at least one superb masterpiece under his belt (that would be August: Osage County).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/th...
https://nypost.com/2022/04/18/the-min...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/202...

[Oliver Pavia]

One of the best, engaging and most f*cked up plays I've ever seen (July 2022) and now read.

[Heather Bottoms]

Excellent satire of the current state of our country on display in a small town city council meeting. Very funny, but soon you sense something is bubbling beneath the surface and my curiosity was piqued. Wonderful payoff with a truly sobering and disconcerting ending.

[leanna]

how do i force everyone i know to read this?

[Chris Orlet]

Very dark and very funny. May be my favorite Letts' play yet. The perfect anecdote for the Trump 2.0 Era.

[Laura]

Really enjoyed it. Would definitely be a good script to work on Meisner with the Mamet-like dialogue and repetition. The ending is a slow burn that doesn't disappoint.

[Jason]

I started out laughing while reading this. The absurdity of small town politics is on full display. I finished with my mouth agape in horror. Letts is a master at turning a story on it's ear and plummeting the reader, and thusly the audience, into a completely different show. Although a few years old, this piece is a horrifyingly accurate portrayal of what our present day political landscape feels like.

[Brittany]

I first experienced The Minutes by Tracy Letts when my local university brought it to the stage. I have limited experience with Letts' style, but knew there would be a twist or something very unexpected as is common in his writing. I left the theatre feeling emotionally undone and weary. I borrowed a copy of the script from a friend who was in the show in hopes that reading it would bring clarity. It did, to an extent.

I started noticing little things about the lines and stage directions. Johnson repeating Carp's name every time the roster was read - I don't think this was in error. I believe she wanted to remind the council what they had done, even though she was complicit. Even though she did nothing to stop it.

The lights are set to flicker when a council member is being hypocritical or stating a bald-faced lie. Not knowing the entire story, this wasn't something I picked up during the performance I saw.

The name of the high school mascot, the Savages, is such obvious foreshadowing for the true story of Big Cherry. But it is glossed over both times the team is mentioned so you don't appreciate it right away. I love that it calls into question, at least for me, who the real savages are.

I think this quote sums up the heart of this play:

"Of course we all want the best for our children, Mr. Mayor, but the way you give them that future matters." - Peel, pg 71

Peel wants to be the bigger man, but even he is afraid. He's afraid that if he stands up to the council, to the city, he won't be able to give his daughter the best future. There are too many competing forces and, at the end of the day, self-preservation and the preservation of family is a stronger force than most people's morality.

[Daniel Preciado]

Although I've seen August: Osage County a few times, this is my first time reading a Letts play, and I'm smitten by its similar thumping of underlying darkness. What is our responsibility to the secrets we inherit? What is our duty to the stains that were spilled long before we walked in? Is there any viable future without proper analysis and amendment of the past? These are not necessarily the questions this play posits, with it also asking questions about what the purpose of a community is and whether some sense of moral corruption is needed to maintain such an ideal, but the question of the link between what was and what will be stuck with me the most. It made me feel dreadful, viscerally repulsed, and other big SAT words to mean that I was reading the last few pages while saying "ugh" over and over. It's a play that's lingered so far in my psyche and made me wildly uncomfortable - a commendable and arguably undeniable mark of a good play.

I always feel the need to end these serious reviews with something that makes me sound less pompous, so here it is: cool!

[Noam]

Wait! Don’t read further yet! Watch the Steppenwolf Theatre Company trailer of this play first. Just click here.

Well, last Saturday, I went to Amsterdam to visit a few exhibitions, stroll through bookshops and to have a Neapolitan pizza before going back home. Amsterdam is about one and a half hour away from where I live and I prefer taking a train in order not to have to search for a place to park and pay a fortune for it. Going by train means I can read on my way too. Since Op weg naar De Hartz, the wonderful Dutch book I’m reading now, is 472 pages long and weighs more than 700 grams, I decided that would be too big and too heavy for me to schlep all day long. I took ‘The minutes’ with me, which is only 82 pages long and weighs only 91 grams.

So here I was, in the train to Amsterdam, reading this play. The setting is the weekly meeting of the Big Cherry city council. Mr. Peel, a new member of the city council, didn’t attend the meeting last week because his mother has passed away. Entering the meeting room, the city council members offers their condolences to Mr. Peel. They talk about their children. Nothing special. Just the usual chitchat.


A local government leaders council meeting, 24 October 2024, in the UK via Wikimedia Commons. The meeting of Big Cherry city council may have looked like this too.

‘BLAKE. … Sorry about your mother.
PEEL. Thank you. What happened last week?
BLAKE. What happened.
PEEL. The meeting, last week. Did something happen with Mr. Carp?
BLAKE. Who have you spoken to?
PEEL. What do you mean? No one.
BLAKE. You've spoken to no one.
PEEL. I'm speaking to you.
BLAKE. You've spoken to no one.
PEEL. I just got back.
BLAKE. But you said you heard about Carp.
PEEL. Just now, coming in, I overheard some talk about Mr. Carp.
BLAKE. Superba didn't mention Carp, did he?
PEEL. No. Should he have?
BLAKE. I'm not sure it's my responsibility.
PEEL. What isn't?
BLAKE. Catching you up.
PEEL. Not your responsibility.
BLAKE. Carp is no longer on the council.
PEEL. What?’ p.6-7

'PEEL. Listen, what is the story with Mr. Carp?
BLAKE. Peel's only now learning about Carp.
HANRATTY. Shame about Carp.
PEEL. Is it?
HANRATTY. Yes. I think so. A man down.
PEEL. Down how?
BLAKE. A bad man down is no tragedy.
PEEL. Mr. Carp isn't a bad man.
BLAKE. I didn't say he was.
HANRATTY. And I didn't say it was a tragedy. I said it was a shame.' p.8-9

‘PEEL. … Looks like I missed an important meeting last week.
BREEDING. What's important? A hundred years from now, will anyone care?
PEEL. Well, if you look at it like that, why show up at all?
BREEDING, Exactly. Good to have you back. We need more of your kind around here.’ p.13

When everybody is there, except of Mr. Carp, the meeting starts. As usual, one of the first thing they do is to approve the minutes of last week’s meeting. Mr. Peel hoped the minutes will offer him some kind of explanation about the absence of Mr. Carp. Well, it doesn’t: The minutes of last week are not available yet. This is a perfectly common situation which we all know from work, study, the club etc. Nothing special. But we’re not there yet: The more questions Mr. Peel asks about Mr. Carp’s absence, the less answers he gets, or the other way around.

'ASSALONE. You missed a meeting.
PEEL. Yes, I missed last week's meeting-
ASSALONS. You missed a meeting. And so now you expect us to use the time in this week's meeting to inform you about last week's meeting. As if that's the best use of our time.' p.30

'BREEDING. Well. That seems to be what you're insinuating
PEEL. Frankly, Mr. Breeding, I'm not sure you're bright enough to create a conspiracy.
BREEDING. Excuse me?
PEEL. But you're simple enough to go along with one. Ms. Johnson, will you please read me the minutes from the meeting of October twenty-fifth?' p.54

Within no time, the situation becomes more and more explosive and hostile, until it’s just too late: The ugly truth just blows up in your face.

Yes, I know: I still didn’t tell you what is this all about, but I’m not going to do that either. I don’t want to spoil your own experience when you’ll read or watch this play.

The text on the book cover describes this play as a scathing comedy. Scathing indeed, but I certainly wouldn’t describe it as a comedy. It has all ingredients of a satire. If it wasn’t so sad, it would have been funny. Tracy Letts shows us through a magnifying glass things we all do. The effect of it is that we just cannot ignore how horrible they are.


The Boer War Memorial Fountain in Halifax, Canada, via Wikimedia Commons. There’s a fountain in this play too and it may have looked a bit like this one.

A play about the human nature, group dynamics and miscommunication. It’s about power, corruption and compromising. A play about democratic processes: By now we all know true democracy is not about the majority being able to do what they wish, but about the majority taking care of everyone’s interests.

Bernet Elzinga, a Dutch professor of stress-related psychopathology, once said that the human brain is built to search for predictability, not for happiness. This play is about the fear to change and holding to narratives we keep telling ourselves, even when we know they are not true. Reflecting the times in which this play was written (2017), it’s about being woke and about cancelling too.

‘HANRATTY. Inclusion, right, I think it's important that we reach out to everybody.
PEEL. Everybody.
HANRATTY. I mean, the unrepresented.
BLAKE. No one's representing them.
HANRATTY. I still think we need to reach out to them, even if we don't have any of them on our board.
BLAKE. Because his sister is handicapped.
HANRATTY. My God, Blake, are you behind on the nomenclature. "Handicapped" went out with sodomy laws.
BLAKE. Don't we still have sodomy laws?’p.9

Clinging to narratives can have devastating consequences for whoever dares to doubt them or just doesn’t fit in the fairy-tale we tell ourselves. This reminds me of Amsterdam once again: If Big Apple is what once was called New Amsterdam, maybe old Amsterdam can be Big Cherry too. 2024 is certainly not 2017 anymore. Amsterdam is one of those places where we learnt the past year that woke narratives are just like all narratives. Whatever becomes a dogma is disastrous for society and leads to its collapse. Processes like those Letts describes took place in the city council of Amsterdam too. These things just happen everywhere.

A confronting play which you would prefer not to read or see, but you really should.

[Zachary Pareizs]

Here is your future.

The dated quality many have remarked upon (written in 2018, Broadway previews in early 2020 (thx Covid), Broadway premier in 2022) now has horseshoed around to being timely again (funny how elections work). It's not a coincidence that there is a focus on monuments, public school education, and the children (though the only one there is even a picture of is Peel's). The names certainly are a bit on the nose, but, I mean, It's Letts! He's great! Also love that he played Mayor Superba on Broadway. Hoping to get cast in this one, as it would be my first time acting in one of his. Very excited to see how the ending gets staged.

[William Harris]

As usual, Letts is brilliant. This skewers, quite appropriately, white America’s toxic, destructive obsession with a mythology and version of history that make Anglo americans the heroes, who’ve never done anything even slightly wrong, and make everyone else, nonwhites including native Americans, blacks, and Latinos, the enemy.

The final scene goes even more unexpectedly dark than anticipated, and the very final moment is wonderfully absurdist.

This play was robbed for the Tony and the Pulitzer.

[Michael]

I know people love this play, and that Tracy Letts is a very talented writer, but I found it... silly. It's a satire about town government, corruption, and revisionist history, but the comedy is rather broad for the most of the play, with some very clever exceptions, and the ending, as written works pretty well, but it has, for me, a major flaw, and when staged, comes across as ridiculously over-the-top.

[Crash Solo]

Having been to my share of official small town government meetings, the territory of this play is very familiar. Letts does an amazing job building tension around some questions and omissions, obscuring and hiding truths in official processes. There’s two big monologues far into the play that will have the whole audience on the front edge of their seats listening to hear the answers to their questions. Really well done, would love to see this one.

[Braden Waller]

This play is WILD. So many small things in here with deeper meaning. I wish I could sit with the writer and dive deeper in the play with them and the intended meaning behind everything. Or another 100 pages of story to explain it all.
I’m so lucky to have seen this show on Broadway and I loved reading through it.

[Jordan Muschler]

Everything is solid, with a great sense of humor and a hidden, darker tone that reveals itself with patience and masterful build-up. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending, however, which goes closer to a morality tale then a balanced examination and which the rest of the play doesn't fully support.

[Steve Scott]

This starts out as a comedy poking fun at the bigoted Babbitts of small town America. It has an explosive revelation and a dark and unsettling ending that moves it out of the realm of comedy entirely.

It reflects current anxieties in the U.S. over mindless jingoism, freedom of speech, and government abuses and corruption.

[Emily Elizabeth]

The pacing early in the play feels very quirky and "Gilmore Girls." I was laughing, but also a bit uncomfortable, then the sudden dose of reality hitting through monologue after monologue made this piece deeply emotionally jarring. I hope to see this, or stage this, someday.

[Morgan Wilcock]

I loved this play when I saw it last year, though it might not be Tracy Letts' best. It felt a bit didactic on the points it was trying to make -- but a year later I still cannot stop thinking about it. What a brilliant playwright, one of our generation's best.

[Bill]

A wonderful account of a town covering up their sins. Set in a town council meeting, one member presses the council to release the minutes of a prior council meeting, after which a council member mysteriously disappeared. Dramatic and filled with story and life. 3 women, 8 men

[Russell]

This was great. This is what I want a play to be when I read or see one.

I don't always feel like I like plays. There's typically something that'll turn me off of really enjoying them. This wasn't like that. It was a great piece to read.

[Not Mike]

Play.

Revisionist history in an American town. White people play.

[JCP]

Studio 54

Directed by Anna Shapiro

[LPF]

4.5. Very good and excellent commentary/storytelling, I just wish the female characters were fleshed out more and the ending lasted longer/had more weight.

[Laurie Ather]

Saw the play 4 times over spring/summer 2022.

Excellent.

[Brian McCann]

Strong, strange many. Not an easy read. I think it must be highly visual so the impact of merely reading it is far less than an in-theater experience.

[Kendall Jeonson]

Okay this is great. Looking forward to The Station Theatre producing this show in the fall. 🥳

[KarenO]

It's a Morality play -- a 21st century American guilt fest. It's not enough to live our own lives uprightly, we must take culpable responsibility for the actions of dead strangers. We are so comfortable, we must be bad. Knock it off already!

[Megan]

Holy shit.

[Sina Develioglu]

Played Mr Peel on a Monday Night reading.