The Courtyard Studio at the Canberra Theatre Centre is one of our smallest theatre spaces, but director/designer Cate Clelland has made it look bigger than Texas – or Oklahoma, at least – for her coming production of “August: Osage County”.

This justly-awarded stage play won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for its author Tracy Letts, but is probably better known for the film version, featuring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

Not to be outdone, Canberra’s Free Rain Theatre has embarked upon a production featuring 13 of our top actors, not least Karen Vickery in the lead role of mother Violet, Andrea Close as her oldest daughter Barbara, Jim Adamek as her straying husband Bill, and David Bennett (a genuine Oklahoman) as the mysterious father Beverley.

In such black a play as this one, it would be normal at this point to say that there won’t be many laughs, but that’s simply not true and Free Rain is billing it as “a dark drama where humour and anguish meet.”

Clelland, who has used the full width of the studio for her staging, said that with 12 characters on stage at one point, she needed a bit of space. For the wallpaper she has used random pages of old books, the text of a thesis and anything she could lay her hands on, which means that if the actors aren’t acting they can read the walls.

As sound designer Tracey Rice adjusted the levels for an Eric Clapton number playing in the background, Clelland told “Citynews” that creating the setting had been a a lot of fun. “It’s like a cross between an ant farm and a game of Cluedo,” she said.

The play, set considerably less than 24 hours from Tulsa, Oklahoma, shows the Weston family members gathering when their poet father Beverly mysteriously disappears and their mother Violet, addicted to prescription drugs, drifts in and out of reality.

As all the home truths come out, Close told us, there was always the sense that the Great Plains of America is just on their doorstep – bleak and beautiful.

That might be an apt metaphor for Letts’ play itself.

“August: Osage County” at The Courtyard Studio at the Canberra Theatre, from today October 17 to November 2. Bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.