'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.” 

'The Roads to Home'

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!”