At Home with "The Orphan's Home Cycle"

Movie fans have sequels and prequels, TV viewers have long had mini-series and now, we theater lovers have marathons. The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s grand trilogy about 19th century Russian intellectuals, was the must-see event of the 2006-2007 season and set off the current hunger for interconnected plays that can be seen over several nights or all in one day. Since then, it seems, each season has had to have one.  Or two. I’m as greedy as the next theatergoer so I lapped up, in one sitting, both the delicious The Norman Conquests last season and the wonderful The Brother/Sister Plays that just closed at the Public on Sunday. Now, I’ve sampled the latest epic, The Orphan’s Home Cycle, nine short plays by Horton Foote that the Signature Theatre Company is offering in three parts over its entire season. 

This past Saturday, while the big snow storm blanketed New York and much of the eastern seaboard, my friend Joy and I spent six hours in Signature’s Peter Norton Space, watching the first two parts, The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Marriage, were moved by what we saw and are already looking forward to the third installment, which is scheduled to begin on Jan. 7.  That last part, The Story of a Family, will play in repertory with the others through March 28, with all-day (11 a.m. to 11 p.m.) marathons scheduled for Feb. 6, Feb. 27 and March 6. 

Foote, who died earlier this year at the age of 92, based the plays on the life of his father, from the elder Foote's hardscrabble boyhood at the start of the 20th century to his days as a young father on the eve of the Great Depression. People tend to say that Foote’s plays are Chekhovian because they’re usually set in country towns (in Foote's case, the fictional Harrison, Texas) involve genteel families grappling with a changing world and don’t have much action.  This time, however, there’s a Dickensian quality to Foote's tales.

In the first two parts of The Orphan’s Home Cycle, Horace Robedaux, the stand-in for Foote’s father, is abandoned as a 10 year-old after his father dies from drink and his mother remarries a man who doesn't care for the boy and so leaves him to fend for himself. Along the way to manhood, Horace works for a crazed plantation owner who works his land with black convicts, courts a widow with small children and eventually elopes with a wealthy man’s daughter. And I’m leaving out lots of other stuff.

All these stories started out as full plays that Foote wrote in the 1960s and ‘70s and many of them have been performed over the years but in 2007, Hartford Stage, perhaps inspired by The Coast of Utopia’s success, commissioned Foote to adapt the plays into the current cycle.  He is said to have  completed drafts of all nine by the time he died in March. But Foote was a meticulous and fully-engaged playwright, who regularly attended rehearsals and even showed up at nightly performances of his plays (my husband K and I spotted him at the back of the audience when we saw Dividing The Estate last year) and I can’t help thinking that he might have done additional work on The Orphan’s Home Cycle.

I haven’t seen any of the full-length versions of the plays but there is an unpolished quality to these shorter ones.  Cuts are noticeable in some cases.  There’s too much exposition in others.  And yet, the power and emotional honesty of Foote’s storytelling comes through. It’s helped in large part by Michael Wilson’s quiet but elegant direction and the pitch-perfect cast he’s assembled, lead by Bill Heck, who plays the grown-up Horace (and his dying father) and Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter, who like all of the 20 other actors in the plays, assumes multiple roles and who remains the best interpreter of her father's work (click here to read an excellent New York Times profile about her). No one else speaks Foote's language, as distinctive in its way as David Mamet's is in his, the way she does, although I thought I heard a couple of the actors trying too hard to imitate her.

Watching Horace’s story unfold over six hours, allowed Joy and me to immerse ourselves in the world Foote created and to get to know his characters in an intimate way.  But if marathon's aren't your thing (or you can't get a ticket to this one) and you have to choose just one of the three parts, see The Story of a Childhood.  All three of its plays are devastatingly good.  

It’s unlikely that you had a family life as difficult as young Horace’s but it’s virtually impossible to watch his story in these plays without thinking about stories of your own relatives, their idiosyncrasies and their sometimes unintended cruelties.  “It’s a reminder," Joy said during one of the intermissions between the plays "that all families are crazy.”  That's an oddly comforting thought and one that kept me warm as I made my way home through last weekend's blizzard.

The Magnificent Reentry of "Exit the King"

Have you ever played the truth-or-consequences style game where you drink a lot and then say which celebrities you’d kick your spouse out of bed to sleep with? Regardless of your sexual orientation, you’re supposed to choose both a man and a woman. My guy-of-choice depends on my mood but I always pick the same woman: Susan Sarandon. So I was really excited about the prospect of seeing her in the new revival of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King.

Sarandon doesn’t turn me on just because she’s a great looking dame and a gifted actor but because she’s also smart, politically courageous, and refreshingly honest. Exit the King marks her return to Broadway for the first time in 37 years and right from the start, she’s been open about her nervousness and about how, as rehearsals went on, she worried whether she was up to the challenge. (Click here to see the interview she gave New York magazine.) Reading all that just made me want to love her more.

Frankly, I was more excited about seeing Sarandon than I was about seeing the play. It was cool to be into the theater of the absurd when I was studying theater in college but, with the exception of Waiting for Godot, plays by writers like Beckett and Ionesco usually left me cold. So imagine my surprise when I found myself shrugging at Sarandon but head-over-heels crazy about the play and totally gaga about her co-star Geoffrey Rush.

The exit in Exit the King is death. At the beginning of the play, Sarandon, playing the monarch’s first wife, tells us that he’s going to die by the end of the show. But even though he is 400 years old, the king doesn’t want to die and the play is a chronicle of his attempts to resist his foretold fate.

Death has been stalking Broadway this season. Everywhere you turn, spirits from the afterworld are haunting this one (the ex-wife in Blithe Spirit, the mom in Billy Elliot, the bookstore owner in The Story of My Life.) Meanwhile, the live characters are wrestling with the inevitability of their mortality (the musicologist in 33 Variations, the matriarch in Dividing the Estate). Still none of those dealings with death display more pathos or panache than Rush does in this sensational Broadway debut.

Rush and his friend and fellow Aussie, director Neil Armfield developed the production and even wrote the adaptation of Ionesco’s original French script. Their translation is fresh and surprisingly funny. But it’s the staging that enchanted me. The play is presented in commedia dell’arte style with clown-face makeup, oversized costumes, live music (a trumpeter plays fanfares and serenades) and hearty doses of slapstick.

Laughing at death, Armfield and Rush seem to say, may be the only weapon we have against it. I’ve read that Ionesco wouldn’t like this approach to his work. I obviously don’t know enough about him to know if that’s true but I do know that I loved it.

I especially loved Rush who literally tries to outrace death or, in limber-limbed displays of acrobatics, to tumble free of it. His antics are matched by the scene-stealing Andrea Martin’s as the palace’s severely overworked servant. Lauren Ambrose is lovely and appropriately sincere as the king’s devoted younger wife. And William Sadler and Brian Hutchinson are pitch perfect as the king’s doctor and his sole remaining guard.

Alas, only Sarandon seems off-key. Her role is, admittedly, the most difficult. She is the voice of reason, which, in this case, means the voice of doom. While the other characters are engaging in all kinds of macabre tomfoolery, she is the show’s straight man. And a nervous one on the night my friend Mary Anne and I saw the show.

“Did you see her hands?” Mary Anne asked when the lights came on for intermission. “I know,” the man sitting on the other side of me leaned over to say before I could answer. “She kept opening and closing them like she was trying to grab hold of her lines.” Her voice, particularly in the early scenes, also carried less well than her castmates’s. But Sarandon comes into her own, and Rush achieves true dramatic greatness, in the show’s remarkable closing scene. I won’t tell you what happens but I will say those final moments are to die for.

Tears for "The Marriage of Bette and Boo"

During my senior year in college, my friend Eric, the most ambitious boy in our theater department, wrote a play about his family for his year-end project and invited his parents to come and see it. He apparently neglected to tell them exactly what to expect because I happened to sit behind them and his mother sobbed dolefully the whole way through as he not only aired all their dirty laundry but poked fun at each piece.

Wrenching family dramas were, of course, a mainstay of the theater long before my pal Eric wrote his but while playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams had been rueful, almost melodramatic, about the failings of their elders, baby boomers like Eric took another approach. Suckled on post-War existentialism and plumped up with treatises about the “absurdity” of modern life like Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” these younger writers took to heart the old adage about laughing to keep from crying and turned out intentionally outrageous works that may have reduced their elders to tears but seemed hilarious to them and their peers.

Eric and his mom kept popping into my head as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new revival of The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Christopher Durang’s absurdist and semi-autobiographical play about his Roman-Catholic family. Durang, now 59, wrote the early drafts of his play while he was still a student at the Yale School of Drama in the 1970s. In what eventually became a series of 33 brief scenes, he charts the unhappiness in his parents’ marriage, which, despite including alcoholism, nervous breakdowns, cancer, senility and four stillbirths, is played largely as comedy.

I didn’t see the original production when it was done at the Public Theater in 1985 with Durang playing the stage version of his younger self in a cast that included Joan Allen, Mercedes Ruehl and Olympia Dukakis (click here to read Durang’s memories of that production on his informative website) and so I don’t know what the audience response was like back then but it was uneasy at the performance I attended this past Saturday night.

You can’t blame the new production. The current cast—lead by Kate Jennings Grant as Bette and Christopher Evan Welch as Boo, with Victoria Clark, John Glover and Julie Hagerty among their loopy relatives—is top-notch, Walter Bobbie directs them in an appropriately snappy fashion and I enjoyed the production (click here to read Durang's thoughts on the revival). But my fellow audience members seemed uncomfortable about laughing at the family’s tribulations—particularly about the dead babies. Several people left at intermission, although you’d have thought that, unlike my friend Eric’s parents, they knew what they were getting into.

Maybe it’s that times have changed. The grey heads in the audience are now more likely to be baby boomers than their parents. And with age, particularly for those of us who have raised our own kids, may have come the ability to be more forgiving about parental foibles that once would have been regarded as laugh-out-loud absurd.

Every family has its stories—and many of them mix tragedy and comedy. That’s obvious at any wake. But nowadays we tend to want to laugh with, rather than at, the subjects of those stories. Which may be why August: Osage County is such a hit and Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate is coming to Broadway this fall. Their families are just as dysfunctional and foolish as Bette and Boo’s but they’re viewed with less irony and more compassion. Which is something Eric’s mother probably would have appreciated.

"Dividing The Estate" is Wholly Entertaining

If Leo Tolstoy were alive today and going to theater in New York this season, he might rethink his famous edict that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I don't know if it's a reflection of the shaky stock market or the fact that the parents of baby boomers are dying but in play after play over the past few weeks, families have been unhappy about one thing: their patrimony. There are the sisters squabbling over the rare stamps their mother left behind in Mauritius. And there are the Russian aristocrats in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and the coffee-growing clan in The Coffee Trees, Arthur Giron's Guatemala-based homage to Chekhov, all lamenting the fates of their once-grand legacies in the Resonance Ensemble productions currently playing in repertory at the Beckett Theatre. But, without a doubt, the best of these battling broods are the Gordons in Horton Foote's thoroughly entertaining Dividing the Estate.

Part of what makes the misery of the Gordons such a delight is the show's impeccable cast. Elizabeth Ashley, scarcely older than the actors who play her children, makes a marvelous matriarch and underplays her trademark smoldering sensuality just enough to make you realize what a vital force this woman was, and is. Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter and renowned as one of his best interpreters, is a hoot as the youngest and greediest of the three adult children, all dependent on handouts from their cash-poor but land-rich mother. Gerald McRaney, best known for his work in several TV series, is totally comfortable on stage and totally believable as the middle-aged ne'er do well who as the only son will always be the apple of his doting mama's eye. And Arthur French as the family's ancient servant was so laugh-out-loud funny that my husband K started chuckling each time he just walked on stage.

But as wonderful as the performances are, it is the rich verisimilitude of the characters and the well crafted play in which they exist that make the evening at Primary Stages' 59E59 Theater such an enjoyable one. Horton Foote, now 91, had his first full-length play produced in 1941, was one of the founding fathers of TV drama in the Golden Age of Television in the '50s, and had his first hit screenplay, the Oscar-winning adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," in 1962. Over the years he has won a Pulitzer Prize, two Academy Awards, a couple of Emmys and the National Medal of Arts. So it would be ridiculous to call him unsung as a writer. And yet, I confess that until the last few years, his name only rang a vague bell with me. But it wasn't just me. Foote has written some 60 plays over his career and only five of them have been produced on Broadway; the longest run was the 10 weeks for the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man From Atlanta back in 1997. The Signature Theatre Company offered some recompense when it dedicated its 2005-2006 season to his work but, of course, that happened when he was 90.

I don't know why more attention has not been properly paid to Foote here in the capital of the theater world. Maybe we city folks just don't appreciate that so much of his work has revolved around the fictional Texas town of Harrison (the stand-in for the small town where he grew up). Or maybe it's that we like our playwrights to be as dramatic offstage as on—like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman and William Inge— while Foote stayed married to the same woman for nearly 50 years and kept his politics largely to himself. Whatever the reason, this production, which is scheduled to play just until Oct. 27, is reason alone to show me the error of my ways.

Foote was in the audience the night my husband K and I saw Dividing the Estate. Sitting ramrod straight in a seat at the back of the theater, nodding graciously to audience members who, recognizing him, went over to shake his hand and say a few words of thanks. Maybe Tolstoy had it right after all. One way to distinguish an unhappy family is to do what Foote does: treat it with love and respect.