Violet Weston is the sharp-tongued, nasty piece of work at the center of Tracy Letts’ brilliant family dissection August: Osage County. Violet can be awfully unpleasant, but she has her reasons, as do all the others in this play that is rich in symbolism but played with a tough realism.

Any good production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play starts with a ferocious, vulgar, and yet sympathetic Violet, the matriarch of an Oklahoma family in transition. Janet Rich is all of that and more in Ypsilanti’s PTD Productions presentation of Letts’ play. She grumbles, complains, coos, and rages in the face of a tragedy that briefly unites her broken family.

Oklahoma in August is dry, hot, and a regular target for tornados. It’s a rough country that was briefly given to Native Americans as an Indian Territory until white settlers saw opportunities and took it back. Beverly and Violet Weston are products of this arid place, but not quite typical of others around them. Beverly was a promising young poet and scholar of poetry and Violet was his muse, until alcohol, boredom, and writer’s block changed everything, The couple’s social progress from hard-scrabble, redneck Depression-era survivors to the parents for three college-educated daughters in their 40s with a different view of the world is a template of America’s rising middle class in the mid-1900s.

One day, as advancing old age and impotent rage begin to take over, Beverly leaves his wife under the care of a young Cheyenne woman and never returns. This sets in motion a gathering of the clan and an alternately ribald, humorous, and heartbreaking exchange of grievances.

Director Liz Greaves-Hoxie brings fluid direction to a complex, rough but also delicate play. Her actors are not equally proficient but they all give honest and hard-earned performances. The central drama between Violet and her daughters, particularly her oldest, is played with a wide range of emotional and physical styles from the needle of a snide remark to outright assault to moments of awkward tenderness. The mix of black comedy and abrasive drama is seamless.

Violet has mouth cancer but continues to smoke, takes a huge cocktail of drugs supplied by an indifferent doctor, and washes them down with alcohol. Rich brings a raspy voice, a keening whine, and blunt-force body to her performance. She finds the humanity buried in the harridan and the need buried in the bitter humor.

Lisa Coveney plays Barbara, the most successful and glamorous of the daughters. She lives with her professor husband and her 14-year-old daughter in Tulsa, only 60 miles from her parents’ rambling old farmhouse in Pawhuska, but a million social miles away. But she and her husband are separated and their daughter is growing up way too fast. Coveney displays both the charm and the fierce intelligence that sets her apart from her two younger sisters. Coveney is ferocious in combat with her mother, playful and a bit giddy in her brief flirtation with an old beau, and broken and bewildered in her relationship with her husband.

Cindy Franklin plays the Ivy, the middle daughter who still lives in town. She is the one under her mother’s firm thumb and still trying to find her way in her mid-40s. Franklin gives a sympathetic performance nicely playing those moments when she gets to relax with her sisters and speak honestly and humorously about their mother. She also shows depth and real pain when her most wayward dream is denied.

Kate Umstatter plays the third daughter, Karen, who has fled Oklahoma for the breezy sunshine of Florida and is dating an entrepreneur with big ideas and a cad’s personality. Umstatter is very good at capturing the motor-mouthed Karen as she rants to Barbara about her hopeless love life and displays the insensitivity to family that made her move away in the first place.

Violet’s sister Matte Fae is another kind of force. She’s that gabby, hugging, garrulous aunt. But she also has her complaints and her secrets. Deena Baty gives an earthy, funny and finally touching performance of a woman who knows all too well aware that her time has passed.

The next generation is represented by the 14-year-old Jean, Barbara’s daughter. Katy Westphal gives a droll performance as a typically bored and testing teenager.

Letts has some broader ideas beyond the conflict of an upwardly mobile family. He also wants to represent the broader changes in society. Mary Hopper plays Johanna Monevata, the Cheyenne nurse hired by Bev to care for his wife. She becomes a usually silent and stoic chorus, suggesting that the woes of this family pale in comparison to those dispossessed by the family’s forebears. Hopper is just right in her deadpan looks and soft-voiced replies.

Others in the fine cast are Joe York, Josh Warn, Brian Hayes, Brad Halsey, Josiah Pankiewicz, and KC Pamateer.

August: Osage County is strong stuff and a challenge to any community theater group for its mix of mordant humor, family tragedy, and subtle but important symbolism. Greaves-Hoxie and her cast and creative team have done a fine job of bringing it all together.

Hugh Gallagher has written theater and film reviews over a 40-year newspaper career and was most recently managing editor of the Observer & Eccentric Newspapers in suburban Detroit.

PTD's production of "August: Osage County" continues at the Riverside Arts Center, 76 N. Huron St., Ypsilanti, at 8 pm on May 12, 13, 18, 19, and 20, and at 2 pm on May 14 and 17. For reservations, call 734-483-7345 or go online to ptdproductions.com.