'The Young Man from Atlanta' (Signature Theatre Company)

I saw the Broadway début of The Young Man from Atlanta with Rip Torn and Shirley Knight in March 1997, but when I saw the current revival at the Signature Theatre Company, I found I didn’t remember the play as well as I thought.  For instance, I didn’t remember it as a depressing, disheartening play—that’s not how I think of Horton Foote (1916-2009).  Sentimental, yes, and with a romanticized vision in this rear-view; poignant, perhaps, and even heartbreaking at moments—but not depressing.  I said after the performance that maybe that’s because when I saw it 22 years ago, I wasn’t 72 and most of my family hadn’t died yet.  As things are now, the play kept bringing me waaay down!

(I had other trouble with my memory with regard to the play.  I remembered seeing the Broadway production—I didn’t look it up, though I meant to—but, first, I thought it had been the play’s première.  It wasn’t: it premièred at Signature in 1995, then played in regional rep houses before returning for a commercial run in New York City.  Second, I thought I’d seen it in the ’80s, not the late ’90s.  I was off by 10 years or more!)

The world première of The Young Man from Atlanta took place from 27 January to 26 February 1995 during the Signature Theatre’s 1994-95 Horton Foote season at the Kampo Cultural Center (31 Bond Street in the East Village).  The production was directed by Peter Masterson with Ralph Waite as Will Kidder and Carlin Glynn as Lily Dale; it won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Foote.

Regional productions were staged by the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, Massachusetts, from 20 October to 19 November 1995; the Alley Theatre in Houston (where the play was developed and had readings) from 16 February to 16 March 1996; and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago from 27 January to 1 March 1997.  That last staging starred Rip Torn and Shirley Knight as the Kidders, directed by Robert Falls, the Goodman’s artistic director.  It was this cast that came to Broadway later that year.

Though there had been publicized talk of bringing back the cast from the Signature début for the Broadway première, the producers decided that some changes need to be made to the pay, so a new director and cast were engaged for the New York transfer, and Falls, Torn, Knight, and the Goodman company were selected.  The production ran at the Longacre Theatre from 27 March to 8 June 1997, and though it lasted only 17 previews and 84 regular performances, received 1997 Tony nominations for Best Play, Best Actress In A Play (Knight), and Best Featured Actor In A Play (William Biff McGuire as Pete Davenport), and a 1997 Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress In A Play (Knight).

The play text is published by Penguin (1996) in a single edition and in the Northwestern University Press collection Three Plays: Dividing the Estate, The Trip to Bountiful, and The Young Man from Atlanta (2009).  An “acting edition” (1995) of the script is available from the Dramatists Play Service.  There’s no video of Young Man, but an audio recording is available.  The unabridged reading, which stars Shirley Knight and David Selby, was released in 1999 by L.A. Theater Works and can be downloaded from http://www.audible.com or purchased through online or local booksellers. 

The STC revival, the first in New York City since the 1997 Broadway run, began previews in the Irene Diamond Stage, the large, 294-seat proscenium house at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row, on 5 November 2019; it opened to the press on 24 November.  Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 6 December; the production closed on December 15 (after a week’s extension beyond its originally-scheduled final performance on 8 December).

Directed by Michael Wilson (who previously helmed Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle, 2009-10, and The Old Friends, 2013, for STC, as well as Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, 2015; and the Acting Company’s Desire, 2015, at 59E59 and Foote’s The Roads to Home, 2016, at the Cherry Lane—all of which I saw and on which I reported on Rick On Theater) and running two hours and five minutes (with one intermission), the STC version of Young Man has lost one character (Miss Lacey—whose role I don’t even recall!). 

In Young Man, Foote brought back characters who’d been seen in his monumental three-evening, nine-play Orphans’ Home Cycle (see my report on 25 and 28 February 2010).  Will Kidder was in his early 20’s in Lily Dale, and approaching middle age in Cousins.  Lily Dale Kidder was introduced in Roots in a Parched Ground as a 10-year-old, and was portrayed in subsequent life stages in Lily Dale and Cousins.  Her stepfather, 78-year-old Pete Davenport, first appears at age thirty in Roots in a Parched Ground.  According to the playwright, he thought he was done with these characters after Cousins, but in the early 1990s found himself thinking about them again and started work on this play.

In Houston in the spring of 1950, Will Kidder, age 61 (Aiden Quinn, back on stage for the first time after seven seasons on CBS’s Elementary), is in his office at the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery, where he has worked since his early 20’s.  He reveals that he’s been diagnosed with a slight heart condition.  Will and his wife, Lily Dale, have just moved into their new house and, as Will tells Tom Jackson (Dan Bittner), the young man Will hired and trained (as he keeps mentioning), “There’s no finer house in Houston.”  He was poor as a child and made a successful career and now insists on only “the biggest and best.”  He’s sunk $200,000 (equivalent to $2.1 million in 2019) in the new house and has put a down payment on a new car as a gift for Lily Dale. 

Will, then, is shocked when his boss, Ted Cleveland, Jr. (Devon Abner, the only cast member who appeared in the 1995 première, playing Tom Jackson), the son of the man Will came to work at Sunshine for, fires him to make room for newer blood.  (If you guess it’s Tom whom Will is pushed aside to make room for, you get a gold star.  Tom, at least, has the consideration to tell Will himself that he’s the one.)  Will announces that he plans to start his own business and contacts local banks to secure loans for the venture; the banks—with whom he’d been doing business for years—aren’t encouraging.

Will talks about his only son, Bill, who had moved to Atlanta.  Bill drowned six months ago at 37, and Will suspects Bill actually committed suicide.  The young man couldn’t swim, yet he walked out into a lake in Florida until the water was over his head.  Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen), Will’s wife and Bill’s mother, refuses to consider such a possibility, instead believing that his death was an accident.  Bill’s roommate, Randy Carter, the “Young Man from Atlanta” (whom we never see) has come to Houston from Atlanta to try to see Will, who believes that all he wants is money. 

(Is it a coincidence that Tennessee Williams wrote a play in 1937 in which a character commits suicide in a way that’s remarkably similar to Bill Kidder’s death in Foote’s Young Man?  The play is called Escape or, in a 2004 New York staging, Summer at the Lake, and was a precursor to The Glass Menagerie; a review of “Five by Tenn,” a bill of one-acts first staged in 2004 which included Escape, was posted on ROT on 5 March 2011.  The suicide-by-drowning was a reference to the suicide death of Williams’s literary hero, poet Hart Crane.  Both Williams and Crane were gay men.)

Lily Dale’s widowed step-father, 78-year-old Pete Davenport (Stephen Payne), lives with the Kidders and he’s being visited by another young man from Atlanta, his 27-year-old great-nephew Carson (Jonny Orsini), who just happens to have lived in the same boarding house as Randy and Bill (and is now staying at the same Houston YMCA where Randy is staying).   Will asks both Lily Dale and Pete for loans to help him launch his new company, but he learns that Lily Dale had given Randy $35,000 (about $375,000 today)—and Bill had given him $100.000 (over $1 million)—all unbeknownst to Will, and he becomes very angry.  He suffers a heart attack and his doctor is summoned. 

Eventually Will insists to Lily Dale that “there was a Bill I knew and a Bill you knew and that’s the only Bill I care to know about.”  The thrust of Foote’s play is the question, ‘What is truth?’  Is it what Will believes?  What Lily Dale believes?  What Randy says?  What Carson says?  The two young men accuse each other of being notorious liars.  Who was Bill really?  He was unathletic, despite his father’s efforts, and a math whizz who moved away from home and only worked menial jobs.  Who is Randy?  Who is Carson?  (Is he even actually Pete’s great-nephew?)

What was the relationship among the three young men from Atlanta?   There are broad hints—on which no one elaborates—that Bill and Randy, who’s 10 years younger than Bill, were gay and lovers.  A review of the 1995 première of Young Man in The New York Times  pointed out: “This being 1950, nobody in the play mentions the word ‘gay,’ or refers even euphemistically to the truth of the relationship between Bill and Randy.”  Was Carson also in love with Bill and jealous of Randy?  We never know, and neither Will nor Lily Dale wants to find out.  As Will tells his wife, he refuses to meet with Randy because “there are things I’d have to ask him and I don’t want to know the answers.”

Threaded throughout the play is Lily Dale’s nearly obsessive quest to confirm the rumors she’d heard of a “Disappointment Club” in Houston during the war.  According to Lily Dale, the club was a conspiracy by Houston’s African-American domestic workers to disappoint their white employers by not showing up on the first day of work.  The rumors say that the clubs were started by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt because she hated Texas.  The apocryphal Disappointment Club is a metaphor for Foote’s theme.  As the New York Times’ Ben Branltey put it, there is a Disappointment Club “though not the kind that Lily Dale imagines.  Everyone in Foote’s plays is a dues-paying member of such a club.  Life according to Foote . . . has a way of letting down and stranding people, and it makes no exceptions.”

The performances in Signature’s revival of The Young Man from Atlanta were all right, but not as good as most I see at Signature.  The only actor whose name I knew (or whom I recognized) was Aiden Quinn, who played Will, and he had line problems.  He even went up in the first scene and his partner had to bail him out!  Later, he bobbled a couple of lines.

Other members of the cast either seemed under-energized—Jonny Orsini even seemed to be playing at his character (Carson), rather than “playing” him (if that makes sense).  Some of the others were the opposite (such as Kristine Nielsen as Lily Dale)—chewing scenery.  The steadiest performances came from Stephen Payne, whose Pete Davenport managed to be both level-headed and reasonable while still suggesting his powers of discernment might be slipping; Harriett D. Foy as Clara, the Kidders supportive and indulgent housekeeper and cook and Lily Dale’s confidante; and Pat Bowie’s Etta Doris, an ancient and sweet-souled former household employee who drops by for a visit.

Director Michael Wilson isn’t a novice, and he’s done some nice Horton Footes before, including at the Signature where I enjoyed the work immensely—especially the monumental Orphans’ Home Cycle (the three-part, nine-play series of one-acts that told the story of Foote’s father’s family that impressed me a whole lot) and The Good Friends.  This production seemed slipshod.  The general softness of the character portrayals, either vague or noncommittal, has to be the responsibility of the director.  The whole production seemed to need tightening and tuning and Wilson seems not to have effected any.

I have to say that this lack of oversight extended to the scenic design of Jeff Cowie, too.  The first scene takes place in the office of Will Kidder, and it’s represented by some stand-alone furniture pieces and a large billboard for the Sunshine Southern Wholesale Grocery.  There are no walls, doors, or windows—and that’s fine.  But then the rest of the play is set in the living room of the Kidders elaborate new house. 

Now, Cowie’s living room set design is also workable—but his imaginary layout of the rest of the house is confounding.  Any time someone leaves the living room, I wondered where the hell he or she was going.  Where’s the front door?  The kitchen?  The Kidders’ bedroom?  It took me a couple of departures to realize that there’s a large interior courtyard outside the upstage wall—suggesting that the house is a sort of square donut.  What’s the point in devising a set plan that confuses the spectator?  It doesn’t help the plot to do that?  So why?  Just because you think it’s clever?

(I was not the only observer who was bothered by this.  Samuel L. Leiter of Theatre’s Leiter Side wrote:

Jeff Cowie’s set . . . provides an architecturally odd impression of the Kidders’ new home.  It’s placed against neutral black curtains at either side, with a substantial window in the upstage wall, beneath which runs a slightly raised platform, with doors up several steps at either side.

Characters enter and leave via the sides, as well as through the [two upstage] doors, even going out one door and entering through the other despite being separated by an exterior yard seen through the window.  At one point we even see two characters walking across the yard as they go from one room to another.  Whatever the explanation for this arrangement, it’s definitely distracting.)

Van Broughton Ramsey’s costumes and David Lander’s lighting are both effective without being assertive.  Dialect coach Shane Ann Younts did a good job keeping everyone sounding as if they come  from the same places—the Houstonians with their Texas twangs and the Atlantans with their Georgia drawls.  (Nielsen is outstanding in creating a vocal characterization—not just an accent, but a whole persona through her voice.  Lily Dale constantly calls Will “Daddy”—which is a little creepy, but that’s Foote’s doing—and Nielsen conjures up a whole world when she speaks that one word!)

As ROTters know by now, there are no longer the stats I used to cite from the website Show-Score, so I’ll get right down to the critical response to STC’s revival of The Young Man from Atlanta.  I’ve selected 15 published reviews from both the print and on-line press coverage. 

Only two dailies reviewed the production, the Times and the Wall Street Journal.  WSJ’s Terry Teachout described the STC production as “as good as it can possibly be” and asserted that it “makes clear the play’s surpassing excellence.”  Teachout characterized the play as “a study in disappointment,” noting all the tribulations that beset Will Kidder (who could be president of Foote’s Disappointment Club) at the height of America’s post-war prosperity.  The WSJ reviewer stated that theatergoers would “not [be] wrong to think” that Foote had written a well-made play, but pointed out that the playwright’s “interest, rather, is in people like Will.” 

The review-writer explained that “the whole point of Mr. Foote’s story is in the telling.  He is, like Thornton Wilder before him, a playwright who believes devoutly in the significance of “the smallest events in our daily life.”  Director Wilson “creates the uncanny illusion that we are not seeing a play performed but watching life unfold before our eyes,” for which Teachout also credited the cast and design team “who make every moment in ‘The Young Man From Atlanta’ seem natural and believable.”  He singled out Aiden Quinn whose performance “is so true to life as to make disbelief impossible:  You’ve known him, and even if you haven’t, you’ll still feel as if you have.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley dubbed the production “an affectionate, slow and steady revival” of Foote’s play and calls the playwright “one of the theater’s great chroniclers of dispossession and denial.”  Brantley asserted, “By rights, [Foote’s] worldview should be deeply depressing.  But the work of Foote is usually as funny as it [is] sad.”  (Somehow, I didn’t find Young Man so.  I found it aligned more with Brantley’s next statement.)  “Superficially, his sturdily built, naturalistic plays are soothingly old fashioned,” the Timesman noted. “Yet the perspective that infuses them is as bleak as anything from those greatest of theatrical modernists, Beckett and Chekhov.”  (A somewhat hyperbolic comparison, I think.) 

Brantley made an analogy many of his colleagues also made: “As embodied with affecting understatement by Quinn, this Will emerges as a spiritual cousin to Willy Loman” of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  (Like Brantley’s comparisons of Foote to Beckett and Chekhov, this match-up is a little overstated as Will Kidder lacks the depth and poetry of Loman.)  In the first half of the play, Brantley reported, “the show is engaging but not enthralling” as Wilson has his cast “bank their fires”; then “the reticence pays off” in the second half. 

Joe Westerfield labeled STC’s Young Man “a touching and funny revival” in Newsweek, giving the lie to the bromide “The truth will set you free.”  Westfield made another comparison with a world-class writer: the Kidders, he said, “are in such denial about so many things that with more of a taste for rotgut whiskey or morphine, they could easily fit into one of Eugene O’Neill’s later plays.”  (He also makes the connection between Will Kidder and Willy Loman.)  The Newsweek writer found, “The ensemble cast is uniformly excellent” and singled out Quinn (who “has morphed from a romantic lead into a solid character actor”) and Nielsen (who “show[s] a tender, vulnerable side to a character who could, in lesser hands seem just vapid” and “is also funny.”  Westerfield concluded by reporting that “Young Man From Atlanta shows Foote at the top of his game.”

“Even the most fervent Horton Foote fan might be hard-pressed to explain the appeal, much less the Pulitzer Prize, of The Young Man From Atlanta,” contemplated Time Out New York’s Melissa Rose Bernardo in the opening of her notice.  “The playwright was renowned for his delicate, layered storytelling, but this 1995 drama lays it on thick.”  Bernardo characterized the STC revival as “an often shaky piece” and noted that actor Stephen Payne as Pete Davenport “looks uncomfortable in even his best moments.”  Director Wilson “at least gives this head-scratcher of a play a handsome production at the Signature, with a couple of inspired touches.” 

Constance Rodgers wrote on New York Theatre Guide that Signature’s Young Man from Atlanta “is lovingly brought to life again” and “immerses us in the quietly desperate lives of Will and Lily Dale Kidder” “with respectful humor” by Wilson’s directing.  “[I]ngeniously written,” Young Man “is old fashioned in style and characterization and that is perfect.”  Quinn and Nielsen “are touching and hilarious” and the STC revival makes a “wonderful evening of old fashioned theater that does not feel old fashioned, just honest and funny.”

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, after a long preamble, Samuel L. Leiter complains that “it’s hard to see from this production [of The Young Man from Atlanta] what might have inspired its receipt of a Pulitzer Prize.”  Leiter went on to explain, “Enjoyable as some of it is, the writing is unmistakably old-fashioned, melodramatic, even, dependent on lengthy, over-obvious exposition, and burdened by an unsatisfying, almost perfunctory resolution.”  The TLS blogger added that “the production often suffers from overacting” and, as I pointed out earlier, Leiter found that the “scene design . . . serves more to confuse than to illuminate the topography of the dramatic locale.” 

Leiter felt that “the play fails to coalesce convincingly” and while the “secondary roles are all decently played,” Quinn “is uneven, ranging from superficially anguished to artificially blustery” and Nielsen “has fewer convincing moments, being unable to meld her familiar flibbertigibbet mannerisms with a realistic portrait of Lily Dale that goes beyond making her a perpetual airhead”; Payne as Pete “is simply colorless.”  Leiter ends by lamenting, “Given the Signature’s devotion to Horton Foote . . . it’s disappointing to see a less-than-superior production of his sole Pulitzer-winning work.” 

“Questions of mortality and regret hover over this sturdy revival” of The Young Man from Atlanta, wrote Zachary Stewart on TheaterMania.  “For all its flaws,” continued Stewart, “it still presents a compelling portrait of the willful ignorance that is a prerequisite for the American dream.”  With a cast the TM reviewer lauded, Stewart reported, “Michael Wilson directs a solid production undergirded by smart design.”  Despite this, however, Young Man “feels like a low-stakes affair.” 

Theater News Online isn’t a site I usually consult, but I spotted that its review of The Young Man from Atlanta was by a sort of old friend from whom I haven’t heard in quite a while: Joe Dziemianowicz, who used to review for the New York Daily News (which seems to have ceased covering theater).  So I decided to include Dziemianowicz’s short notice in my round-up.  He characterized STC’s Young Man as “a starry but unpersuasive revival” as it “leaves you wanting—and wondering.”  Dziemianowicz asserted that “the saga clunks along more than it clicks,” adding that “Foote’s folksy plainspokenness tolls, and the quietly eloquent grace notes that tug you in are scarce.”  He blames Wilson’s “stiff and at times unwieldy staging.”  The TNO reviewer summed up his opinion by observing, “Amid confessions and accusations out of left field, the play finally gets traction as Will and Lily Dale must make concessions and confront hard realities.”  In the end, he concluded that “one grows weary waiting for the late-blooming ‘Young Man’ to grow up into something satisfying.”

On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovan warned that Wilson’s Young Man “might not be a mood-elevator,” but Quinn “imbues his character with a Texan-size ego and the vulnerability of an aging man who has lost his only son” and Nielsen “is fine as the spoiled wife, mother, and lapsed artist . . . who’s struggling to survive an unspeakable tragedy.”  Cowie’s set with Lander’s lighting “mirrors the dreams and disappointments of the Kidders” while Ramsey’s “costumes bring out the personality of each character.”  The production “can make you marvel at the resilience of the human spirit,” concluded Donovan, as it “illuminates the inner turmoil of a middle-class American family.”

Darryl Reilly of TheaterScene.net labeled Young Man a “wrenching . . . family secrets drama” and described the STC staging as “a tender revival.”  Reilly also invoked Death of a Salesman, but asserted “with his idiosyncratic and powerful command of dramatic writing [Foote] creates a distinctive narrative.”  The TS.net reviewer reported that “Wilson’s staging utilizes the accomplished technical elements to optimum effect” and scene designer Cowie’s “inspired efforts are integral to the production’s success.”  Reilley also lauded Lander’s “shadowy lighting,” John Gromada’s “jaunty and moody” original music and his “deft” sound design, and costume designer Ramsey’s “varied creations.”  He concluded, “Horton Foote and The Young Man from Atlanta’s stature is affirmed by this luminous incarnation.”

Fern Siegel on TheaterScene.com (not the same as the site above) explained that in The Young Man from Atlanta “Foote explores the dark side of the American Dream, as well as the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.”  Siegel reported that “Quinn plays Will . . . with brutal honesty” but “Nielsen . . . utilizes the same facial tics in all her roles to indicate disbelief or confusion.  It may be humorous the first time, but it wears thin.”  The TS.com reviewer added, “The ensemble cast is sound, and Michael Wilson’s direction is smooth.”  She feels that  “Foote is a subtle, understated playwright not known for his poetic dialogue,” concluding, however, that “he is adept at capturing ordinary people facing difficult moments with authenticity.”

On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora labeled Young Man a “deeply moving play about loss” that “provides joys and sorrows that remind us, again, of Chekhov’s plays, with their continuity of location and thematic content.”  It is a “gentle, heartwarming, heartbreaking play,” she said, which Wilson has directed with “sure and steady hands.”

“‘The Young Man from Atlanta’ . . . is the wrong play by Horton Foote to revive,” declared Jonathan Mandell in the very first sentence of his New York Theater review.  He found it “dated, and overrated” and filled with many “scenes that feel slow-moving and tangential.”  Mandell’s major complaint about Young Man is that not only are the characters keeping any mention of homosexuality off the stage, but so does Foote, who even employs “a hoary plot line for a drama that was first produced some 30 years after Stonewall”: the suicide of a closeted gay man.  For the New York Theater reviewer, this made The Young Man from Atlanta less worthy of revival than many other Foote plays. 

On New York Stage Review, Jesse Oxfeld started off making a similar complaint: Bill Kidder was gay, a “thing never said, and barely even hinted at,” and the review-writer found “in 2019, . . . that feels awfully old-fashioned.”  Oxfeld believes that the story Foote should be telling is the one about Will Kidder and his reversal of fortune and how he contends with that.  Instead, the play’s

hung up on the question of Bill’s death, whether we should believe the stories told by his unseen roommate, that young man . . ., or whether we should instead believe the distant relative who shows up from [Atlanta], claiming that the roommate’s stories are all lies.  And that’s much less interesting, because we’re not really invested in any of those young men, who all seem to be ciphers.

(I would point out to Oxfeld that it’s not Randy, the roommate, and Carson, the Atlanta relative, in whom we’re supposed to be “invested.”  It’s Will and Lily Dale.  It’s not the story-tellers who are our—and I believe Foote’s—focus, but the way the competing stories affect the listeners and how they respond.  After that, the success of the play becomes a question of how well Foote and Wilson accomplish that drama.)

Oxfeld reported that Wilson “presents a solid, straightforward production” and that the “performances are equally solid and straightforward.”  He praised Ramsey’s costumes (“appropriately, straightforwardly, midcentury Texan”) and Cowie’s set (“elegant, high-1950s”).  The NYSR writer noted in the end, “We never really learn what happened between the younger men, who is lying and who is telling the truth,” and remarked, “That may be how things were in Houston in the 1950s.  But on stage today, it doesn’t make for much drama.”

Despite a “uniformly strong” cast, James Wilson of Talkin’ Broadway felt, “The Young Man from Atlanta feels somewhat mechanical.”  Wilson found, “The exposition is a bit heavy handed, and the appearance of particular characters (including a former maid, portrayed by the excellent Pat Bowie, as well as the arrival of an acquaintance of Bill and Randy) rings as rather too coincidental.”  The TB reviewer thought the production is “up to Signature's usual high standards,” remarking that “Jeff Cowie’s set design is appropriately sterile and museum-like (but with a central courtyard, it is somewhat confusing in the layout of the off-stage rooms).  Van Broughton Ramsey’s costumes are period and class specific, and David Lander’s sunny lighting contrasts with the dark truths the characters wish to keep hidden.”  Wilson praised all the cast members and concluded that The Young Man from Atlanta  “may not pack the wallop it did twenty-five years ago, but [it] offers a potent view of the United States on the cusp of social and political change.”

Because of the unstated (yet central) theme of homosexuality in America in the middle of the last century, I want to present one additional review, one that comes from a gay perspective.  In Cultural Weekly, a free on-line platform for independent voices, David Sheward, the former executive editor and theater critic for Back Stage, the theater trade paper, observed that Young Man “reflects the attitude towards gays of the era of its setting (Houston in 1950).”  Sheward pointed out, “The queer figures are not even on stage, one of them has committed suicide, and they are only important in how they affect straight people.”  Sheward laid out the details of this unspoken theme:

The main struggle is that of bragging businessman Will Kidder (bluff but vulnerable Aidan Quinn) and his flighty, sweet wife Lily Dale (simultaneously tragic and comic Kristin Nielsen).  Several months after the mysterious death of their only son Bill, they are confronted by the unwelcome visit of the title character, Randy, Bill’s much younger roommate.  Will does not want to see Randy, but Lily Dale craves his company as a reminder of her child.  While the word gay, queer or homosexual is never even spoken and Randy remains offstage, it’s clear he and Bill were in a relationship and neither parent can face the truth.  This unmentionable secret is but one of many problems confronting the Kidders.

The CW writer reported, “The play has some clunky structural problems. The first scene is all exposition,” he complained, and Carson’s arrival and the fact that he conveniently lived in the same boarding house as Bill and Randy, seems contrived.  But “the production overcomes the script’s flaws,” Sheward acknowledged.  “Young Man honestly examines American middle-class mor[e]s of equating wealth with happiness and unflinchingly rips away the prosperous facade of the couple’s elegant existence as they must confront economic and emotional reality.”  Wilson “delivers a heartfelt, straightforward staging,” asserted Sheward, “with an impeccable and moving cast capturing the quiet desperation of Foote’s lonely family, detached from their gay son.”