There’s story theater and, apparently, there’s story
theater. The first is the theatrical
presentation of a story (or stories), usually fairytales or fables, by a group
of actors often playing multiple roles. Characterized
by simple scenery and props used imaginatively, the narrative performance is
often improvised and music is frequently incorporated in the production. The other kind, less often seen on
professional stages, is a play in which the characters do very little, but sit
or stand around telling stories to one another.
It’s a variety of talk theater (see Oslo
and A Day by the Sea, reported on
this blog on 13 August and 17 September, respectively).
Horton Foote’s The Roads to Home is, unhappily, an exemplar of story theater
type 2. A collection of three
connected one-act plays (A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, Spring Dance), Primary
Stages’ Roads is staged in
two acts by Michael Wilson, director
of Foote’s monumental Orphans’ Home Cycle at the Signature Theatre
Company in 2009 (see my report on 25 and 28 February 2010), for which he
received both a Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award. Playing at Primary Stages’ new home, the
Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, The Roads to Home, running two hours and 10 minutes,
including a 15-minute intermission, started previews on 14 September and opened
on 5 October; the revival is scheduled to close on 27 November (extended from 6
November). Diana, my usual theater
companion, and I caught the performance on Friday evening, 7 October.
The Roads to Home, premièred Off-Off-Broadway at the
Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, under the direction of Calvin Skaggs, in New York
City on 25 March 1982; a revised version was directed by Foote (featuring the
late Jean Stapleton, most recognized as Edith Bunker on Norman Lear’s All in
the Family on TV, as Mabel Votaugh) for the Lamb’s Theatre Company in 1992. (Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter who
appears as Mabel in the current revival, played young Annie Gayle Long in both
the earlier productions.)
The Cherry Lane Theatre, located at 38 Commerce Street in the
West Village between 7th Avenue and Hudson Street (and a few blocks south of
another landmark Village playhouse, the Lucille Lortel), is New York City’s
oldest continuously running Off-Broadway theater. Opened in 1924 in a former farm silo built in
1817, the Cherry Lane contains a 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio. The structure also served as a tobacco
warehouse and box factory before the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and other
members of the fabled Provincetown Players converted it into a theater. It has hosted works by some of the United
States’ most illustrious playwrights, from Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Gertrude
Stein to Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Sam
Shepard and David Mamet, as well as important European writers like Sean
O'Casey, Luigi Pirandello, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. The Living Theatre performed at the Cherry
Lane and in 1962, producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder introduced New York
(and the U.S.) to a new dramatic genre with a program entitled Theatre of the
Absurd at the Cherry Lane.
By the late 20th century, however, the building was
suffering from old age and lack of maintenance.
In serious danger of falling into ruin, the building was bought in 1996 by
Angelina Fiordellisi, who began investing in structural improvements. She went into debt and the playhouse ceased
producing, but Fiordellisi kept the building standing. (It served as a rental theater for
independent productions and occasional rep company seasons.) In 2011, Fiordellisi announced that the theater
had retired its debt and would reopen again for productions.
Primary Stages was founded by Casey Childs, currently its
executive producer (the current artistic director is Andrew Leynse) in 1984 to produce
new plays and foster the development of playwrights, both established and
rising. In 2004, Primary Stages moved
from its original 99-seat home, the 45th Street Theatre (renamed the Davenport Theatre in
2014) on West 45th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues to the 195-seat Theater A
at 59E59 Theaters; in 2014, the company moved its productions to the Duke on
42nd Street. Its current home, beginning
earlier this year, is the Cherry Lane, home now to Roads. Primary Stages has
presented over 125 productions in its 32 years, many of them premières. In addition to Foote, the writers represented
on the troupe’s stages have included A. R. Gurney (Indian Blood, 2006; Buffalo
Gal, 2008), Willy Holtzman (Sabina,
2005; Something You Did, 2008), Julia
Jordan (Boy, 2004), Romulus Linney (2: Goering at Nuremberg, 1995), Donald
Margulies (The Model Apartment, 1995;
Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, 2009),
Christopher Durang (Adrift in Macao, 2007),
Terrence McNally (The Stendhal Syndrome,
2004; Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams,
2005), John Henry Redwood (The Old
Settler, 1998; No Niggers, No Jews,
No Dogs, 2001), John Patrick Shanley (Missing/Kissing,
1996), Mac Wellman (The Hyacinth Macaw,
1994; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997), Lee
Blessing (Going To St. Ives, 2005; A Body of Water, 2008), and David Ives (All in the Timing, 1993; Mere Mortals, 1997).
Aside from producing plays, Primary Stages
also launched a teaching program, the Marvin and Anne Einhorn School of
Performing Arts (ESPA), in 2007, and since 1995 has conducted the Dorothy
Strelsin New American Writers Group, a residency program for emerging playwrights. Primary Stages is also associated with
Fordham University to offer a Master of Arts degree in playwriting. In 2008, Primary Stages won the Lucille
Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work; the company’s productions have garnered
many additional awards and nominations.
(Of the plays listed above, I have seen a fair number; the reports for
several have been posted on ROT.)
Before the revival of The Roads to Home this year, Primary Stages has presented Foote’s The
Day Emily Married (2004), Dividing the Estate (2007), and Harrison,
TX (three one-acts: Blind Date, The One-Armed Man, The
Midnight Caller; 2012). The company
also presented When They Speak of Rita by Daisy B. Foote, the
playwright’s second daughter (Hallie Foote’s sister), which Horton Foote
directed in 2000.
I’ve seen four previous Horton Foote plays: The Young Man from Atlanta on Broadway in March 1997; The Trip to
Bountiful in 2005 (report posted on 25 May 2013); The Orphans’ Home
Cycle, a nine-play cycle telling the story of Foote’s father’s life (25 and 28 February 2010); and The Old Friends (10 October 2013). (There’s no report on Young Man. The last three productions were all at the Signature
Theatre Company.) The playwright was
born in 1916 in Wharton, Texas, the town in the southeast of the state he came
to call Harrison in his plays. (This
year has been Foote’s centennial, the reason for the revival of Roads to
Home—and some other events—at Primary Stages.) He didn’t actually start out to be a writer;
he caught the acting “call,” as he put it, as a child—at nine, he says, when he
played Puck in a school production of Midsummer Night’s Dream—and
decided he wouldn’t go to college “because I didn’t think that would be good
for an actor.”
The budding thespian performed in plays through high school, under the
tutelage of the speech teacher who recognized his talent for theater, and after
graduating at 16, worked for a year in his father’s haberdashery store and
traveled weekly to Houston to continue his acting studies. At 17, he took a bus to California to study at
the Pasadena Playhouse. From there, he
went to New York City in the fall of 1935 and worked at the famous Provincetown
Playhouse and attended the Tamara Daykarhonova School for the Stage where he “was
re-trained by the Russians.” He also
joined with some other incipient actors and formed a group called the American
Actors Company that worked above a garage, a precursor to
Off-Off-Broadway.
Agnes de Mille, already an established dancer and choreographer, came
to the troupe to do a project that included sketches and improvs about the
places each of the performers came from.
Naturally, Foote did his about Texas.
De Mille took him aside afterwards and told him, “I think there’s
something going on here. You should
think about writing.” So Foote
immediately composed a full-length play, Texas Town, writing the lead
role for himself, and the American Actors Company staged it. On opening night, 29 April 1941, Brooks
Atkinson, the New York Times reviewer and the dean of New York theater
journalists, was in the house on West 16th Street and gave the play “a rave,”
according to Foote (“it does considerable honor to a group of tenacious young
actors”; “gives a real and languid impression of a town changing in its
relation to the world”; “it is impossible not to believe absolutely in the
reality of [Foote’s] characters”; “Mr. Foote and the American Actors Company
have performed a feat of magic”). Foote
also reports that Atkinson liked all the acting (“most of the acting is
interesting and thoughtful”) . . . except the author’s (“none of the parts is
stock theatre, except perhaps the part [Foote] plays himself without much
talent and with no originality”).
The company disbanded that summer and Foote says that “the acting
desire just left me.” In exchange, “I
became intensely fascinated on writing.”
Thus, a playwright was born, but he’s affirmed, “I think being trained
as an actor was very helpful to me.” He
explains that otherwise, “to me it’s like writing for a symphony, if you don’t
know the instruments.” As his daughter
Hallie affirms, "He writes wonderful parts for actors.” (As an erstwhile actor, I’d agree—especially
his women’s roles, which are, as an acting teacher of mine would say,
“juicy.” In addition, Foote occasionally
directs, both his own plays and his daughter Daisy’s, and I can attest that
knowing actors and acting is a marvelous asset for a director.) The Roads to Home gives proof of Foote’s
acumen as an actors’ writer for, even though it has deficiencies in its
dramaturgy, the characters are the kind actors love to do.
In his early writing career, Foote gravitated to television, becoming
one of the principal writers in TV’s early days in the live era. He wrote for episodic television as well as
the drama anthology series that were popular in the early 1950s. What’s arguably his best-known play, The
Trip to Bountiful, premièred on NBC television in 1953 before débuting on
Broadway (with Lillian Gish and Eva Marie Saint appearing in both
productions). Foote continued to write
for TV right up till the ’90s, winning an Emmy in 1997 for his adaptation of
William Faulkner’s Old Man. Meanwhile,
he was writing for the stage (Only the Heart, 1944; Six O'Clock
Theatre, 1948; The Chase, 1952).
His stage plays became popular fare in New York on Broadway,
Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway, and in regional theaters across the
country. Foote also wrote for films,
most notably the screenplay for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962),
winning him an Academy Award. Other
screenwriting includes Tender Mercies (Academy Award, 1983), Trip to
Bountiful (Academy Award nomination, 1985), and Of Mice and Men
(1992).
In the mid-’60s, though, Foote’s writing, out of step with the headier
(and often angrier) work of emerging writers like Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber,
Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, and Edward
Albee, fell out of favor. Then the Oscar
recognitions of the ’80s raised his profile again and theater companies came
calling. Hallie Foote, the
playwright’s literary executor, quips that “my father will be around forever.” Next year alone, for instance, will see
regional productions of The Trip to
Bountiful by the Good Theater at the St. Lawrence Arts Center in Portland,
Maine (29-30 April 2017), and at the Waterfront Playhouse in Key West (24 January-11
February 2017) and Dividing the Estate
at Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré in New Orleans (24 March-2 April and 13-15
April 2017). Hallie Foote says she’s
discussed with Houston’s Alley Theatre a staging of The Orphans’ Home Cycle and the trilogy may also appear soon as a
television mini-series. In addition,
there may be another major Broadway revival of a Foote play, following 2013’s Trip
to Bountiful, in 2017 and a musical adaptation of one of his scripts, to be
co-written by Daisy Foote, is in development. (The actress declined to name either
play.) In 1996, Foote was inducted into the American
Theater Hall of Fame and The Young Man from Atlanta won the 1995
Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2006, the
dramatist won a Drama Desk Award for Career Achievement and on 20 December
2000, Pres. Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
Foote died at 92 in 2009 in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was
finishing the work on Orphans’ Home Cycle, which was to première at the
Hartford Stage before coming to New York’s Signature Theatre Company. The Trip to Bountiful received an
all-star posthumous revival on Broadway, starring Cecly Tyson (who won a Tony
for her performance) in 2013; it was filmed for television in 2014, garnering
two Emmy nominations. All four of Foote’s
children have become theater professionals: daughter Hallie and son Albert are
actors, son Walter is a director, and daughter Daisy is a playwright.
Almost all Foote’s writing, whether for the stage or the
screen, original or adapted, “evokes a lyrical sense of place and strength of
character,” as interviewer Ramona Cearley put it. Indeed, he’s affirmed,
“I feel that place is very important in my work.” But he rejects being labeled a “Southern
writer” or even a “Texas writer.” “I’m a
Wharton writer,” he insists. Foote
paints on a small canvas, but he’s exceedingly detailed. “I try to be as specific about this town [i.e.,
Wharton] as I can be without being parochial.”
His characters, especially the women, have the sort of eccentricities
common in the fiction of Southern writers, but they’re far less Gothic. They’re also deeper and more complex.
At his best, as in Trip to Bountiful, the
dramatist’s small-town milieu serves as a microcosm for the human condition. Even when the plays don’t expand so
universally, as in Roads to Home, his prose is so evocative and
poetic (he is to white Southerners in that respect what August Wilson is to
African Americans—he turns them into what playwright-director Emily Mann called
“poets of everyday speech”) that you can become mesmerized by his speeches and
dialogue. (That’s heightened when an actor like Lois Smith or Foote’s
daughter Hallie gets a hold of the part.
It’s symbiotic: Foote’s writing attracts actors and then the actors use
his writing to develop fascinating characters.
He’s not exactly actor-proof, but he is actor-enabling. Wilson’s like that, too.)
On a par with his evocation of place and character, Foote
also acknowledges, “I’m essentially a story teller.” A voracious reader as a boy, the authors he
names as important to him are all story writers: Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, William Maxwell, Eudora
Welty, Peter Hillsman Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, and Reynolds Price. Furthermore, in the Foote and Brooks families, recounting
family lore and relating the lives of kin was a common pastime. As a child, while his younger brothers—the
writer was the oldest of three boys—were outdoors running and playing, Horton
would be sitting on the porch listening to his relatives telling their
stories.
The dramatist was also something of a hoarder, as Foote
interviewer Sheila Benson observes: he prowled flea markets and auctions to
collect bits of Americana, folk art, and family mementos, much the way he
collected the histories of his relatives and his neighbors. Both of these collections, Benson asserts, were
assembled “with wit and sureness and a touch of the unexpected” and the stories
have been recycled into his scripts just as the people in Harrison Foote knew
or learned of became the characters in the plays. This phenomenon is indisputably the case in The
Roads to Home. It’s a play, as I
said, all about stories.
The first playlet, A
Nightingale (Act One, Scene One of the Primary Stages revival), takes place in the kitchen of Jack and
Mabel Votaugh’s Houston home. It’s early
April 1924 and Mabel’s next-door neighbor and best friend, Vonnie Hayhurst
(Harriet Harris), pays a call. Vonnie
finds Mabel (Hallie Foote) preparing for the expected but uninvited daily visit
of Annie Gayle Long (Rebecca Brooksher), a young acquaintance of Mabel’s from
Harrison, where they both grew up. As
she prepares coffee for her vistors, Mable tells Vonnie, who’s just returned
from a visit to her hometown of Monroe, Louisiana, stories and gossip about
Harrison and, particularly, Annie, whose behavior since she witnessed the
murder of her father by his closest friend on the main street of Harrison has
become decidedly peculiar. When Annie,
who lives across Houston but likes to ride the streetcar, arrives, it’s clear
she’s slipping inexorably into insanity.
(Her neurasthenia falls somewhere between Alma Winemiller and her mother
in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke.)
In the midst of other conversations,
Annie breaks into song (“My Old Kentucky Home” seems lodged in her mind) or
points her fingers like a pistol and shouts “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
at odd moments. The older ladies are a
little taken aback by Annie’s eratic behavior, but not really put off by it—as
if it were a version of normal conduct.
Annie’s husband (Dan Bittner), who repeatedly asserts that Annie’s behavior
is directed at him, arrives to collect her, but she resists and after he gets
her out of the house, she returns looking for her children whom she thinks she
left behind at Mabel’s.
In the second play, The
Dearest of Friends (Act One, Scene Two), it’s six months later, and Mabel’s
in her parlor while her husband, Jack (Devon Abner), dozes off in his
chair—waking periodically to ask if it’s ten o’clock yet, so he can go to
bed. Vonnie rushes in—no one in Mabel’s
neighborhood apparently bothers with locking doors—in an absolute tizzy and we
soon learn the cause. Having heard so
many stories from Mabel about Harrison, Vonnie and her husband, Eddie (Matt Sullivan), took a train
trip there to see what her friend had been talking about all this time. (Both Jack and Eddie work for the railroad,
so they get passes.) Eddie’s become
involved with a Harrison woman he met on the train and wants a divorce. Mabel
and her husband sympathize with Vonnie’s situation—a good deal more time is
spent figuring out who the other woman is than solving Vonnie’s problem—but,
when Eddie shows up, dressed in his robe and nightclothes, they don’t get
themselves directly involved even though the crisis is unfolding in their home.
Act Two of Roads to Home is devoted to the third playlet,
Spring Dance, set in a garden outside an auditorium in Austin four years later. Annie’s been confined to the State Lunatic
Asylum in the Texas capital and, all dressed in semiformal evening finery (the
men are in black tie), she and her fellow patients—two young men she knew as a
girl in Harrison, Dave Dushon (Bittner) and Greene Hamilton (Sullivan), and a
fourth resident, Cecil Henry (Abner)—are attending a dance going on just inside
the terrace’s French doors. Annie, who
won’t dance because she doesn’t think it’s proper for a married woman, behaves
with scrupulous politeness as befits the genteel lady she still sees herself
as; her companion, Dave, is essentially catatonic as Annie chatters on about
her family and her life in Harrision.
Greene, however, is dancing up a storm inside and periodically waltzes
his way out of the auditorium; he doesn’t seem able to stop moving to the music
even though he has no partner. Greene
tells Annie that both he and Dave will be going home to Harrison for a month’s
visit the next day, but we shortly discover that neither he nor Annie have any
grasp of the passage of time or any of the other ordinary markers of life—they
can’t remember, for instance, how long they’ve been at the asylum, when they
last had visits from their families, or when letters with news from home
arrived and Annie keeps smelling chinaberry blossoms, a scent from her
childhood in Harrison, even though there are none in the asylum garden. Cecil, who’s not an acquaintance of the
Harrison contingent, enters from the auditorium now and then to ask Annie to
dance, though she refuses his invitations each time; he has no more hold in
reality than the others as he’s sometimes married and sometimes not, sometimes
a father and sometimes not.
The Roads to Home was disappointing despite a
good production. It’s all talk and, more than that, it’s two hours of
storytelling. There’s virtually no dialogue—a few sections of
stichomythia—as each character has long passages of telling tales about
their pasts. Ben Brantley said this in his New York Times review, but it wasn’t clear to me how static and
long-winded the performance is. The saving graces are that it’s Foote’s
prose, which is still poetic and evocative, and the cast, which is excellent.
These aren’t enough to remedy the total lack of theatricality and
action—the three narratives really ought to have been Tennessee Williams-type
short stories—but they managed to prevent the evening from being unbearable.
Furthermore, these nearly-plotless little snapshots of a
particular place, time, and selection of personalities don’t illuminate
21st-century America, much less the human universe. As the Washington
Post’s Michael Toscano aptly said of the play (in another, unrelated
production): “‘The Roads to Home’ provides a pleasant journey, but eventually
you can’t help asking where those roads lead. They provide the theatrical equivalent of a
scenic Sunday afternoon drive rather than taking you to any meaningful
destination.” As portrait miniatures, the
three playlets aren’t unappealing or uninteresting, but revealing they’re
not.
They’re also not especially engaging since while I felt for the characters and their problems, I
didn’t feel with them; I couldn’t
identify with anyone on the stage. Foote
has asserted that he’s “just never had a desire to write about any place” other
than Wharton/Harrison, although he admits to having “tried to write about New
York, . . . and the work just doesn’t have the same ring of authenticity
as when I write about” his hometown. But
“because the things that happen [in Wharton] can happen in a big city,” as the
dramatist insists, and “emotional life doesn’t vary very much” from one place
to the next, Foote’s best plays always rise to a level of universality. The world of Roads didn’t expand beyond the time and place of its setting. In a sense, the best Foote plays, like Bountiful, unfold in living color, but Roads is sepia-toned. Since Roads has been staged twice
before in New York, it’s not an unknown quantity. With all the Foote
plays available—he had a long career and was pretty prolific—I wonder why Primary
Stages chose this one to revive for his centennial.
Though Roads isn’t
Foote’s best work, the three playlets still present detailed and sensitive
portraits of Southern women (as depicted in literature, if not in real life) and
the genteel life of the playwright’s small-town milieu. Like his best writing, the characters,
especially the women in Roads are meticulously
drawn, providing the excellent actresses meat enough to create deep
characterizations. The same is true of
the settings: Foote’s plays evoke such a palpable sense of place and atmosphere
that designers like Primary Stages’ Jeff Cowie (sets) and David C. Woolard
(costumes) are inspired to devise a physical stage environment that breathes authenticity
in minute detail.
Though the one-acts are connected by recurring characters
and snippets of situations—Annie, for instance, is clearly headed for insanity
in Nightingale and then in Dearest of Friends, we hear that she’s
been committed to the state hospital (Mabel even talks about writing to her)
before we encounter her there in Spring
Dance—the overall arc of Roads to Home is diffuse and makes no
general point. (The playlets are
separated and announced by title slides projected on a black background like in
a silent movie, a pastime which we learn is important in the ladies’ lives.) The closest Foote comes to a unifying theme
is a look at people displaced by their economic, personal, or, in Annie’s case,
psychological situations, trying to find their way back to the safety of home
(i.e., Harrison or, for Vonnie, Monroe). Harrison may be less than 60 miles from
Houston, but the comfort of home is out of reach. Furthermore, Foote is suggesting, home may not
even be so safe anymore. (In addition to
the cautionary stories Mabel and Annie tell about Harrison—and some of Vonnie’s
tales of Monroe are no more comforting—it’s notable that two of the men
interned at the asylum with Annie are from Harrison and when Mabel visits the
town, her marriage is destroyed.) Even
the individual one-acts have no resolutions—we never find out, for example,
what happens to Vonnie and Eddie or what becomes of Annie—they just trail off
when Foote runs out of story. Or
stories, since, as the playlets have no plots of their own, the fabric of each
play is the tales the characters tell one another.
Primary Stages gives The Roads to Home an attractive
and well-mounted production at the Cherry Lane.
I’ve already mentioned briefly the set and costume designs, so let me
expand on the physical production first.
The first two one-acts are the most closely connected and director
Michael Wilson presents them as two scenes of the first act, so scenic designer
Cowie integrates them by making the parlor set of Dearest of Friends the flipside of the kitchen set in Nightingale. The back wall of the kitchen is indicated by
a couple of hanging cabinets over the sink and stove, but there’s no actual
wall; in fact, Mabel steps into her living room to make a phone call during Nightingale. In Dearest
of Friends, the reverse set-up is used and the scene change employs a
revolving set to strike the kitchen and reveal the parlor, reinforcing the
illusion that these are two neighboring rooms in the same house, both of which
look well lived-in. As I observed
earlier, Cowie includes many small details in the set decoration and Wilson
makes sure there are many homey hand props for the actors, especially the
women, to handle, such as coffee cups and saucers, tea cakes, and bottles of
Coke. It’s a very everyday world.
David C. Woolard’s clothing is not only visually evocative
of mid-’20s small-town Texas, but it conjures up an entire world. (Houston, a large city today of nearly 2½
million people, is portrayed in Roads
as an oversized village; as I already noted, he characters in the play never
bother to lock their doors. Its
population in 1920 was under 140,000 and, what’s more, the neighborhood where
Mabel and Vonnie live is virtually an extension of Harrison.) The house dresses Mabel and Vonnie wear in
Act One suit this world and the two women like uniforms; there’s no doubt they
live in these clothes. The same is true
of Annie’s dressier visiting outfit and the men’s work attire, whether Mr.
Long’s business suit or Jack’s railroadman’s working duds. Even the formal wear of Annie and her young
men in Spring Dance seem somehow
fitting as the dress of people of means and station in their world, even as
they seem almost comically out of place at the mental hospital. But that, of course, is part of Foote’s
world, too.
Alongside the lighting of David Lander and the soundscape of
John Gromada, it all brings to life the milieu of this group of people at a
particular time in southeastern Texas.
If the chinaberry blossoms weren’t all in Annie’s head, I might have
smelled them myself (if I knew what chinaberry blossoms smelled like, of
course—but you know what I mean). On top
of this, the acting completes the illusion of stepping back almost a century
into a small southwestern town; it’s like experiencing a holodeck program on Star Trek:TNG’s Enterprise. What I don’t
know for sure is whether the physical environment inspired the actors or
whether they’d have managed the same feat even on a bare stage. Given the stature of the cast, however, I’m
gong with option 2 but with the caveat that, like all good actors, the set,
costumes, lights, and sound fed their already activated imaginations. Stanislavsky’d eat it up!
Since the plays are about the women, the three actresses have
the spotlight throughout Roads to Home.
Bittner, Abner, and Sullivan all do creditable jobs with their various
roles, but the men, especially the three husbands, pretty much function as
catalysts, sounding boards, and rationales for the women to tell their
stories. All three actors do this
solidly. (It might help that in two of
the couples, the actors are real-life significant others: Hallie Foote and
Devon Abner, the Votaughs, are married, and Harriet Harris and Matt Sullivan,
the Hayhursts, are partners.)
Hallie Foote, often called the theater’s best interpreter of
her father’s characters, is close to astounding in her portrayal of Mabel. Knowing a little about how Horton Foote
developed his characters from people he knew in Harrison, often members of his
family, I assume Mabel was drawn from someone real, and it’s almost as if the
actress knew her (or them) just as well.
(When I saw Hallie Foote in The Orphans’ Home Cycle 6½ years ago, she was playing women whose descendant she is and I said
of her work that “she almost
seems to be living the plays rather than acting in them.”) If Primary Stages’ Roads were all about the acting alone, Hallie Foote’s
personification of Mabel Votaugh would make the evening. She doesn’t miss a note; her every gesture is
unimpeachably right. As a lesson in
Stanislavskian acting technique, if you could bottle it and sell it, it’d be
worth a million bucks!
Harris and Brooksher, as Vonnie and Annie, both inhabit
vivid and astutely conceived characters.
Brooksher’s Annie can be annoying when she goes on apparently endlessly
in her delusional world, but that’s more in the writing than the acting. The actress manages very well to make Annie
the subject of deserved concern and sympathy, both from her older friends on
stage and from the audience. (This, in
turn, makes Bittner’s Mr. Long seem the more callous when he tries to coax her
back home in Nightingale, but I
believe that’s also deliberate on Foote’s part.) Beneath the veneer of delusional confidence, Brooksher
maintains a core of a little lost girl which is only revealed overtly in a few
instances. We see the persona she’s been
brought up to show the world and which her husband prefers—but, as an acting
teacher of mine would say, Brooksher’s “up to something.” Harris’s Vonnie, who provides the small
instances of comic relief in what’s an increasingly melancholic evening, is the
character with the most dramatic arc in the play. As Vonnie goes from sisterly neighbor and
friend who helps Mabel cope with Annie’s going over the edge to the distraught
wife of a philandering husband in a disintegrating marriage, Harris essentially
sublimes from kindly concern in Nightingale
to near hysteria in Dearest of
Friends. Though the shift occurs
between Scene One and Scene Two and Foote doesn’t lay any groundwork for it,
Harris makes the transition entirely believable—and justifiable.
Wilson, by now a dab hand at Footian melodrama (he’s also directed both the 2013 Broadway
revival of The Trip to Bountiful and its TV film adaptation the next
year, garnering him a DGA best-director nomination; the Tony-nominated 2008
Broadway mounting of Dividing the Estate; and Off-Broadway productions
of The Carpetbaggers and The Day Emily Married), wrings
just about all the poignancy and drama out of the static script as he can. With the help of the superb actors, whom
Wilson has apparently encouraged to follow their unerring instincts, he’s managed
to stage the three little character studies with sensitivity but without
letting them sink into sentimentalism. Foote
himself warned, “I think sentimentality is an evasion of reality, it’s just not
looking at the truth of the thing.” Roads
to Home doesn’t reveal much about our world today—though it may say some
interesting things about people in general—but it sure as hell looks squarely
and piercingly at the society Foote limns in the three playlets, and Wilson,
with the inestimable collaboration of his cast and design team, has made that
real even if it can’t sustain two hours of theatergoing. I can’t see anything any director could do to
make that happen.
The press coverage of Primary Stages’ revival of The
Roads to Home was light, possibly because, despite the quality of its
production, it’s the second revival in New York City of a minor Horton Foote
work. Show-Score surveyed 15 outlets
for an average rating of 81, relatively high by my observation. (Among the missing from my usual suspects are
the New York Post, Daily News, Newsday, and am New York
among the dailies; the websites NJ.com and NorthJersey.com, which cover
respectively the Newark Star-Ledger
and the Bergen County Record; New York magazine from the weeklies; Variety of the theater and entertainment
press; the cyber journal Huffington Post;
and the theater websites Broadway World
and both NY Theatre Guide and New York Theatre Guide.) Show-Score reports that 100% of the reviews were
positive; there wasn’t a single negative or mixed notice.
Terry Teachout of the Wall
Street Journal, observing that ordinary life is “hard to put on stage,”
asserted, “It takes a special kind of writer to find compelling beauty in the
ordinary, and Horton Foote did it better than anyone.” Calling Wilson’s Roads “richly involving,” Teachout said it “serves as a reminder
that you needn’t set off firecrackers to seize an audience’s attention.” “It’s impossible to say enough good things
about Mr. Wilson’s production,” continued the Journalist, praising the cast for being “wholly conversant with
Foote’s idiom.” The play “feels a bit
thin here and there, relying as it does on the relaxed rhythms of casual
conversation to make its dramatic effect,” complained Teachout, but in a
well-mounted production like Primary Stages’, “you’ll be more than content to
sit and listen—and marvel.”
In the New York Times
(which received Show-Score’s lowest rating, one of two 70’s in the website’s
survey), Ben Brantley affirmed that “talking is close kin to breathing, and
almost as essential to [the] survival” of the women of “this plaintive,
meandering trilogy,” who “are all displaced persons of a sort.” “Gabbiness,” explained the Timesman, is “an existential force . . .
in Foote’s world.” Acknowledging that
the “loose-jointed triptych hardly ranks among Foote’s finest work,” Brantley
said that Roads “lacks the
seamlessness of Foote at his best” and the play’s dialogue, which Brantley
complained “can seem like monologues,” “seems not woven but nailed together.” Nonetheless, Brantley admitted that for him,
it’s “a home-baked treat too delicious to miss.” Despite Brooksher’s skill as an actress,
though, her Annie can’t help but be “a pain in the ear,” and Brantley wrote, “The
heart sinks a bit when you realize that the final play . . . is all about” her.
The Times review-writer concluded
that “it’s the onrushing ordinariness of [Foote’s] plays that makes them so
very poignant.”
The Village Voice’s
Michael Feingold posited that Roads to
Home “offers . . . a quintessence of [Foote’s] disorienting approach” to
dramaturgy, which the Voice writer
explained is that “the talk” of his apparently realistic circumstances “tends
to be the opposite of dramatic.” Feingold
was referring to Foote’s use of storytelling, which the reviewer found “unlike
anything else in dramatic literature.” Though
the Voice reviewer described the
lives of Foote’s characters as “often bleak,” director Wilson “handles [Roads] with ease, adding in exactly
enough bright color to cover the basic darkness.” Feingold concluded: “The performers’ vivacity
reinforces the paradox: Spacious, sunshiny, and seemingly ordinary, Foote’s
Texas is as spiritually dark as any Beckettian landscape.” The New
Yorker called Hallie Foote a “highlight” of the Primary Stages’ Roads to
Home, the first two parts of which “are pure, if slightly undercooked,
Horton Foote” and the third playlet forms “a jarring coda.” The “Goings On About Town” columnist summed up
the production by averring that “Foote fans will be fascinated to see the
playwright dip a toe in Tennessee Williams waters.”
In the Hollywood
Reporter, Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” was; “Although not major Foote,
these works offer myriad subtle pleasures.”
He stated that Foote’s art is “on terrific display in the Primary Stages
revival of The Roads to Home,”
in which the “playwright frequently leavens these tragic situations with droll
humor.” Scheck reported that “The
Roads to Home is less concerned with plot, of which there isn’t much,
than with subtle character revelations” and that Wilson’s “quiet direction
. . . enhances the cozy intimacy, as do the ensemble’s excellent performances.” Labeling the play “a minor effort,” the HR
reviewer concluded, “But it offers enough subtle pleasures to infuse us with
the warm feeling.” Time Out New York’s
David Cote observed that the ”drama unfolds though folksy banter and
recollected histories” and found that Wilson’s “firm, translucent production
hits the right notes of melancholy, dry humor and nostalgia.”
Dubbing Primary Stages’ Roads to Home “a fine revival,”
Samuel L. Leiter described the play as “a chatty, thinly plotted, occasionally
comic, but ultimately affecting domestic drama about average, not especially
dramatic, people” on Theatre’s Leiter
Side. Leiter concluded, “Home may be where the heart is, but the
effort to recapture it, if only in memory, is nothing short of heartbreaking
in The Roads to Home.” On Theater Pizzazz, Brian Scott Lipton
found that Roads “is like a welcome
helping of comfort food” for Foote fans, even though it “isn’t exactly
quintessential Foote.” Lipton explained,
“The comedy is . . . broader than usual, and the tragedy a little deeper,”
adding that the production “not just coheres, but tickles the funny bone and
touches the heart,” which is “a testament to” the director “and the excellent
ensemble.” Despite its minor status
among Foote’s works, Roads to Home, in the opinion of the TP reviewer, is “definitely a journey
worth taking.”
Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania
likened the play to a “sepia-toned portrait” of the milieu, given “sensitive
direction” and “gorgeously designed and beautifully acted.” Still, Stewart found the playlets “occasionally
absurd sketches” which, nevertheless, “Wilson and his cast are able to find
real emotional depth in.” The reviewer, however,
warned, “Theatergoers who live for sharp-tongued exchanges and explosive
confrontations are likely to be underwhelmed,” though, “if you take the time to
slow down and really listen, you’re likely to find a vibrant epic within the
subtext.” On CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman
acknowledged that Roads “may not be
in the top tier of [Foote’s] canon but is . . . framed by a engaging
serenity and a gentle touch of sadness.”
The Primary Stages revival has “a sublime cast” and “fine direction” by
Wilson; the settings, costumes, and lighting are all “first rate.” Characterizing the Primary Stages revival of Roads
to Home as “sensitive, lovely, and oh-so-slightly-underpowered,” Matthew
Murray described the play as “sepia-tinted nostalgia” on Talkin’ Broadway (Show-Score’s other 70 rating). The play’s “as fiercely magical and
fiendishly funny as it is chilling,” averred Murray. The direction, said the TB review-writer, “is focused but soft” and Cowie’s set “occupies
its own region of memory,” lighted “tactically,
knowingly” by Lander.
Show-Score handed out three top ratings of
90 to the notices for The Roads to Home, none to sites I usually survey.
So, in the interest of completeness, I’ll include Lighting & Sound America in this
round-up. In his opening line, David
Barbour asserted, “Sometimes I think we have it all wrong when we call Horton Foote a playwright;
really, he’s a composer, wringing music both merry and melancholy from the
everyday conversation of his characters.”
Calling the playlets “delicate materials,” Barbour found them “handled
with . . . sensitivity and perception,” though he regretted the intermission
between the first two one-acts and the last because it “threatens to shatter
the carefully wrought atmosphere that Wilson and company has [sic] so deftly established.” “In other respects,” the cyber reviewer said,
“the production is beautifully judged,” praising each of the actors and all the
design artists. Barbour agreed that Roads “is a minor work, a chamber piece
in three movements, but it is no less resonant,” concluding that “in [Foote’s]
hands, the deeply ordinary seems extraordinary. And when his characters talk—oh, the music
they make!”
