'August: Osage County' at Cadillac Palace: Estelle Parsons is bringing the family home

She works out “with weights and the bike.” On alternate days, she runs. She ingests steam. “When I wake up in the morning, my whole body, as well as my brain, is shaking,” she says, matter-of-factly, from her Dallas hotel. “I always feel like I am not going to get through the day.”

Or the role. Parsons plays Violet Weston, the matriarch in Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of familial dysfunction on the Plains. The role was originated at Steppenwolf in Chicago by the Tony Award-winning Deanna Dunagan, who has spoken often of the psychic toll demanded by the part of a substance-addicted woman capable of the wholesale, real-time destruction of her adult daughters.

“August” premiered at Steppenwolf in summer 2007 and had a hit Broadway run from fall 2007 to spring 2009. It had a similar effect on a lot of its original cast members, none of whom is in the touring show, which arrives at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on Tuesday for a two-week reprise stand (although the cast does include some Broadway replacements, like Parsons, and several actors with long ties to Chicago). Most of the original crew say the brutal parts, which they almost all played for many months on both sides of the Atlantic, took a toll on their souls.

Take Chicago actress Amy Morton, a Tony nominee for her brilliant work as the original Barb Weston, daughter to Violet, and who assisted Chicago director Anna D. Shapiro with the staging of the tour.

“If you had told me that I had to go back to that rehearsal table again,” said Morton, in an interview last fall, “I would have been like, ‘Are you kidding me?' That play was so physically and emotionally grueling. I was inside that woman for far too long.”

The change in cast for the tour was fine with Letts. “I really have to say,” the playwright observed last fall, soon after the tour had completed rehearsals, “I was kind of relieved not to be looking across the table at the same exhausted faces.”

Parsons says she deals with the demands of this piece mostly by trying to wrestle Violet to the ground and keeping her pinned. “I have to characterize myself as a violent, ferocious actress,” she says. “That rouses everybody in the cast. That way, nobody sloughs off.”

Ferocity, though, has its price.

“It's terrible,” she says. “The night before last I didn't sleep a wink. I was up the entire night. Stuff like that happens when you're old. Would you believe that three days ago, I thought I just discovered the key to the entire play? Then I realized there was so much more to it.”

The version of “August” that arrives at the Cadillac Palace this week is the original Steppenwolf and Broadway production, as directed by Shapiro, with the same physical production. Although some in the original cast are contemplating returning for a reprise production in Sydney next summer, this likely will be the last time Chicagoans will have a chance to see the original staging of perhaps the most successful piece of theater to emerge from this city.

It is, of course, a different and much larger venue this time around. The Cadillac Palace is about four times the capacity of Steppenwolf. That's par for the course on the road. “If people walk out,” Parsons says, chortling, “We don't even know it.”

More likely, they stay in their seats. Pinned by Parsons. And a great American drama, made in Chicago.

“Wherever we've been with this play, audiences have responded,” Parsons says. “It is a play that is so true of America and why people go through all that they go through. We have a sense of humor in this country. That is why we survive. I guess I am talking of myself.”