So, just what does it take to get an 81-year-old actress to take a show on the road.

Well, if the 81-year-old actress just happens to be the Oscar-winning Estelle Parsons — and if the show just happens to be Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County — then the question really should be: How do you stop her?

“They didn’t ask me. I asked them,” Parsons says, not a little proudly, of the show’s producers and her decision to become part of the touring company. “Of course, I assumed the original cast would want to (do the tour). This play is such a piece of Americana and I wanted so much to have the country experience it and I wanted to experience it with them.”

And apparently, what Parsons wants, Parsons still gets.

In fact, she’s talking to me from Oregon, where she’s preparing to once again essay the role of Violet Weston, the drug-addicted matriarch of the dysfunctional Weston clan at the heart of Letts’ tale. She’ll be playing the same role Thursday when the touring company pulls into the Canon Theatre.

Described by some as the mother from hell, and often compared to characters like Virginia Woolf’s Martha, Streetcar’s Blanche and Long Day’s Journey’s Mary, it’s a role she’s been playing — first on Broadway, then on tour — since the first post-Tony performance, when, in addition to the award for best play, actress Deanna Dunagan collected a Tony for best actress.

“She won the award on Sunday and I went in on Tuesday,” Parsons confirms, clearly still a little bewildered that Dunagan didn’t want a little time to soak in the glory of the award.

“I said to her: ‘Don’t be silly. Stay here for a week. Enjoy it!,’” she says, adding that she can nonetheless understand why Dunagan might have wanted to put the role behind her.

“I’ve done a lot of really hard plays and musicals, but this one takes a particular lot out of you,” she says.

That said, Parsons is not for a moment buying into the theory that Violet is some sort of sister to a pantheon of legendary women created for the stage.

“I don’t compare her with those other women,” she insists, even while she admits that they do have more than a few things in common — and she’s certainly not a monster.

“She’s much larger than life,” she says. “But I don’t find her horrible. I just find her so badly abused.

“I think she’s terribly interesting. I just think she would have been a terrific person if she hadn’t been burdened with one thing and another.”

That’s not to say that Violet has always been a comfortable fit.

“In the beginning,” Parsons says, “it did bring up a lot of my dark side, which I’d had to squelch for a lot of my life. I was quite shocked at what an unpleasant person I could be without even trying.”

But even though she’s occasionally found it tough, she has never found it boring.

“I always find it hard to go to work,” she says, “but I think the style of (the play) is so dynamic ... It’s written in such a dynamic style that you don’t have to plunge into the depths, but you do have to have them there.

“It’s not really a reality play. It exists in what we call the verbal line and it just has to zing along. It can’t be done ponderously or slowly. It has to zing along.”

As for the problem of character spillover, well, that’s taken care of itself — almost.

“In real life,” she says with a chuckle, “I find myself saying f--- in the wrong place. I’ve become too liberated.

“Once you get that play under your belt, it fits.”

And suddenly, it’s August, all year long.