Another Century Of Struggle: Horton Foote And Orphans’ Home Cycle Review, Part One

Not every American would recognize his name, but most would know Horton Foote’s most famous works – not his plays, but the films “To Kill A Mockingbird,” made from the screenplay he adapted from Harper Lee’s novel, and “Tender Mercies,” from his original screenplay. The writer noted for investing quiet small-town characters with inexpressibly explosive feelings won Academy Awards for both films, and when he died earlier this year, ten days shy of his 93rd birthday, he had racked up an impressive array of lifetime achievement awards, overdue recognition for a life spent chiefly as a playwright.

Yet Horton Foote is rarely mentioned in the average theatergoer’s list of great American playwrights, certainly never in the same breath as that other scion of the South, Tennessee Williams, despite Foote’s 50 plays and a progressively powerful presence in the theater.

Will Horton Foote’s reputation start to improve now that the Signature Theater Company is mounting nine of his plays in a monumental theatrical event called The Orphans’ Home Cycle? It happened before. It was the Signature that rescued Foote from relative obscurity when it devoted a season to his work 14 years ago, which led to critical acclaim, a Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “The Young Man in Atlanta,” and that play’s transfer to Broadway, the first Broadway production of one of Foote’s plays in 43 years. (All in all, he had eight on Broadway, including last year’s Tony-nominated Dividing The Estate.)

Now in the Signature’s Off-Broadway home off 11th Avenue comes the Orphans’ Home Cycle, roughly nine hours chronicling one man’s life over some three decades, based partly on Foote’s father, starting from the age of 12 at the turn of the 20th century. On the evidence of the three plays of Part I, I am already hooked – as I have been on much at the Signature, a theater company I long have admired both for their approach to theater and their treatment of theatergoers.

These first three hour-long plays, presented together under the title “The Story of A Childhood,” offer a committed cast of 21 actors in a splendidly fluid production that promises to turn Foote’s character studies (most of which had been produced previously) into a theatrical epic that recalls such past stage marathons as the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s Life and Adventure of Nicholas Nickleby or Robert Shenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle– all at a cost of just $20 per ticket.
When first we meet Horace Robedaux, he is 20 years old (played by the actor Bill Heck, who will serve in the role of the adult Horace for seven of the nine plays) on a train to Houston to meet his mother. A seatmate on the train engages him in conversation in a way that an older Southern lady might a young Southern gentleman in 1910:
Are you baptized?
I don’t know, Ma’am.

Do you say your prayers every night?
No Ma’am.

This is only a prologue, and we begin to understand the cause of the man’s rootlessness as the stage is transformed — the sets sliding into and out of place almost cinematically — into the fictional town of Harrison, Texas about a decade earlier, the setting of the first play, “Roots in a Parched Ground.” On either side of the stage are the homes of Horace’s maternal and paternal families, the Thorntons and the Robedaux. Horace’s mother, a Thornton, is separated from his father and will not even speak to him. The Thorntons have come down a great deal in the world, as has all Southern gentility. Her grandfather was the governor of Texas and owned a plantation that stretched “from here to the coast.” She now works as a seamstress, stitching shirts piece-meal to try to make ends meet.

On the other side of the stage, and across what becomes clear is an un-crossable divide, are the Robedaux, an educated family that too has hit hard times. Horace’s father, a well-read lawyer, is an alcoholic dying at the age of 32.

Twelve-year-old Horace (now played by Dylan Riley Snyder) has energy and ambition (he wants to become the lawyer his father wants him to be); members of both sides of his family promise to help him fulfill his aspirations. His father’s death and his mother’s abandonment of him spell the end of those promises. This becomes clear in the second play, “Convicts,” a version of which was made into a film starring Robert Duvall, Foote’s most frequent leading man (whom Foote is credited with discovering.)

Horace is now 14 (played by Henry Hodges), a sixth grade dropout working on a thread-bare plantation that once used slave labor and now contracts with the state to use prison labor. Gone is any pretense of gentility. In its place is harshness, drunkenness and madness, presided over by a senile old plantation owner (a scene-chewing James DeMarse) who likes to sleep in a coffin, shoot his gun at imaginary bears and murderous convicts, and prepare for his own death. Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter, does a tasty turn as the owner’s slutty, drunken, abusive niece.

In “Lily Dale,” we are back in 1910, and Horace has arrived at the Houston household of his mother, his sister Lily Dale, and the man his mother married, Mr Davenport, who does not like Horace and treats him with an unfairness that is infuriating to watch; it was because of Mr. Davenport that Horace had not been allowed to grow up with his mother.

“Lily Dale” is also the name of a song that Horace’s father used to sing, and Horace asks his sister to play it on the piano. It is a piano rag, and it struck me that “The Story of A Childhood” covers the same time period as the musical, “Ragtime,” looking at the disruptions of that era from a more intimate angle. Perhaps as we end the first decade of the new century, we are finally able to look back at what we called the American century and realize that the twentieth century began with as much uncertainty and misery as the 21st.

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The Orphans’ Home Cycle, By Horton Foote
Part One – The Story of A Childhood
Through March 28th at the Peter Norton Space of Signature Theater Company, 555 West 42nd Street
Directed by Michael Wilson
Scenic design by Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber, costume design by David C. Woolard, lighting design by Rui Rita; music and sound by John Gromada, projections by Jan Hartley, wig and hair design by Mark Adam Rampmeyer; choreography and movement by Peter Pucci; fight director, Mark Olsen; vocal and dialect coach, Ralph Zito Space

Cast: Devon Abner (John Howard/Pete Davenport), Mike Boland (Mr. Ritter/Billy Vaughn), Pat Bowie (Martha Johnson), Leon Addison Brown (Jackson Hall), James DeMarse (Soll Gautier), Hallie Foote (Mrs. Robedaux/Asa Vaughn), Justin Fuller (Albert Thornton), Bill Heck (Horace Robedaux/Paul Horace Robedaux), Henry Hodges (Lloyd/Horace Robedaux, age 14), Georgi James (Lily Dale Robedaux, age 10), Annalee Jefferies (Mrs. Thornton/Corella Davenport), Virginia Kull (Corella Robedaux as a young woman), Maggie Lacey (Inez Thornton as a young woman), Gilbert Owuor (Leroy Kendricks), Jenny Dare Paulin (Minnie Robedaux Curtis, age 17/Lily Dale Robedaux), Pamela Payton-Wright (Mrs. Coons), Bryce Pinkham (Pete Davenport), Stephen Plunkett (Terrence Robedaux/Will Kidder), Lucas Caleb Rooney (George Tyler as a young man/Sheriff), Dylan Riley Snyder (Horace Robedaux, age 12) and Charles Turner (Ben Johnson).
Running time: three hours with two ten-minute intermissions.
Ticket price: $20

Note: The Orphans’ Home Cycle is in three parts. Part 2, “The Story of A Marriage” is scheduled to open December 17; Part 3, “The Story of a Family,” January 26, 2010.

Photographs of “Part One – The Story of A Childhood” by Gregory Costanzo. First: Bill Heck and Pamela Payton-Wright. Second (left to right): Charles Turner, Henry Hodges, James DeMarse, Leon Addison Brown