When Horton Foote was growing up in Wharton, Texas, his parents, he remembers, always showed great respect for a man whom his father said had been “called” to be a minister.
“I didn’t know exactly what that meant,” Foote says, “but when I was 10 years old, I knew it was happening to me. I got the `call’ to be an actor.
“There was no reason for it. I hadn’t seen any theater, except for medicine shows and tent shows and a production in Houston of `Shanghai Gesture,’ with Florence Reed. But I wanted to be in the theater, and that was that.
“When I was in high school, I appeared in a one-act play contest as a young man addicted to drink and dope. When the play was over, the judges asked my teacher if that was a natural thing, or if I was acting. My teacher said it was acting, and I got a prize.
“Well, that did it. I wanted to leave while I was in high school, but my parents made me wait a year. When the year was up and I had turned 16, I left home to work in the theater.”
That was 65 years ago and Foote, who will be 81 this March, has been working in the theater ever since, first as an actor and, since 1940, as a playwright. He has written extensively for television, beginning in 1951 with scripts for “The Gabby Hayes Show” and going on to many of the prestige drama shows of television’s “Golden Age” in the 1950s. And he has done very well in the movies, where he has won two screenwriting Oscars, for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962 and for his own “Tender Mercies” in 1985.
But always he has come back to the theater, writing steadily for the last six decades and topping his body of work with the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in drama for his “The Young Man From Atlanta.”
He is in Chicago now, awaiting the Monday opening of the play at the Goodman Theatre in its pre-Broadway engagement, through March 1. He has just finished working on a movie for cable television; he briefly interrupted his stay here to attend a reading of one of his plays in North Carolina; and, in the morning in his Chicago hotel suite, he sets aside time to pen (literally) his memoirs. But he is rarely absent from rehearsals, adding a bit here or deleting a line there as he sees Rip Torn, Shirley Knight and the cast unfold the story. Says Robert Falls, “Young Man’s” director and a big Foote fan, “Horton just loves to be in the theater.”
Foote says he has always cherished the idea of working in the theater, and even now he speaks with vivid memories of his early years as an actor and writer.
He began his career in 1933 in the Pasadena Playhouse in California.
“The first thing they told me when I landed there was that I had to get rid of my Texas accent,” he says, “so I took private speech lessons. I was pretty proud of the results, until I went home for a visit and found out that my little brother was charging his friends a nickel apiece to hear me talk.”
But he learned a lot there. He saw a series of Ibsen plays produced by actress Eva LeGallienne, and that, he says, “changed my life.”
After two years in Pasadena, he went to New York, linking up with a group of young off-off Broadway artists who had banded together under the name of American Actors Company. He was an actor then, but, encouraged by some of his fellow workers, including choreographer Agnes DeMille, he tried his hand at writing.
In his first full-length play, “Texas Town,” produced in 1940, he portrayed the leading character, an unhappy young small-town man who fails in love and is killed in an auto accident. “Brooks Atkinson (the reviewer for The New York Times) gave me a bad review,” Foote remembers. “He hurt my feelings.” (When he says this, with a twinkle, he looks a little like Clarence, the old apprentice angel in “It’s a Wonderful Life”).
But by then, he had been caught up in the act of writing. “I became passionate about writing,” Foote says. “It’s what I wanted to do, which was strange, because the only writing I had ever done before that was a short story I wrote for a cousin who was going to fail English.”
Foote has written many scripts in his many years as a playwright, including the book for a mammoth stage version of “Gone With the Wind” that was produced in London in 1972. But his reputation rests chiefly on the dramas he has made out of the lives of people who resemble his forebears and relatives and who live in Harrison, Texas, a Gulf Coast town near Houston, much like his own Wharton.
Principal among these plays are the eight works he wrote in a three-year period in the 1970s. Each play can be seen independently, but, joined together, they form a family history, extending roughly from the start of the century to the late 1920s. Foote calls the collected works the “Orphans’ Home Cycle,” a title that comes from a poem by Marianne Moore, who described the world as an orphans’ home.
“When I was a boy,” the author recalls, “I loved hearing these stories about my ancestors and my family. They became like legend and myths to me, told and retold over the years.”
Many of the characters–including Will and Lily Dale Kidder, the principals of “The Young Man From Atlanta”–pop up in several of these plays, their lives traced from youth to maturity and from courtship to marriage.
Foote wrote them at a time when he was depressed and almost “traumatic” about theater in New York. “It was about taking off your clothes and saying four-letter words,” he says, “and I didn’t feel compatible with that kind of theater.”
There was not much demand for his work in the theater at the time, so he was able to write most of the cycle without interruption, away from New York, at a house in New Hampshire. Since then, as Foote’s reputation has grown, the plays have been produced, individually and out of sequence, in theaters throughout the country; a few of them, including “1918,” “On Valentine’s Day,” “Courtship” and “Convicts,” have been made into movies.
“The Young Man From Atlanta” is not part of the cycle, but it does pick up the lives of the Kidders in the 1950s at their home in Houston, at a time of family crisis, when they have learned of the death of their only son.
Like Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, who have influenced his work, Foote can be called a “realistic” playwright, but his selection and piling on of minute detail goes beyond surface realism into a deep psychological study of his characters and their dilemmas.
“Young Man’s” creation took Foote unawares, he says. “One day I woke up and began to write. Simple as that. But I really do believe that what you write chooses you, not the other way around. You just have to make peace with that.”
His life changed radically in 1992, when Lillian, his wife of 47 years and mother of their four children, died. And Foote works now in an environment far removed from his beginnings in the theater. “When I started out and first came to New York,” he says, “the only place to go was Broadway. Today, there are wonderful theaters all over the country. And think of all the young playwrights who have come along. David Mamet, Sam Shepard, people like that.”
Some things for Foote have not changed, however. “I still love the theater. I almost feel that I should pay people to let me be there.”
`YOUNG MAN’S’ LONG AND WINDING ROAD
`The Young Man From Atlanta” is traveling from the Goodman Theatre to New York in a route that exemplifies the winding, sometimes tortured trail a play often must follow.
Horton Foote’s play had its premiere in January, 1995, in a 26-performance, off-off Broadway engagement by the tiny Signature Theatre, which devoted its entire season to the playwright’s work. Despite a limited run in a 75-seat theater, “Young Man” received generally excellent reviews and became one of three plays nominated by the Pulitzer Prize drama committee for the 1995 award. (David Mamet’s “The Cryptogram” and August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” both of which also originated away from Broadway, were the other finalists.)
By the time Foote’s work had been selected for the prize by the Pulitzer board of governors in April, 1995, the play had closed. However, plans were then made to take the show on the road to larger resident not-for-profit theaters, including the Huntington Theatre of Boston and the Alley Theatre of Houston, before a planned Broadway opening in spring, 1996. Peter Masterson, who had staged the Signature production, again was to direct, with Ralph Waite and Carlin Glynn repeating their acclaimed portrayals of the embattled elderly couple, Will and Lily Dale Kidder.
But with the production doing only spotty business in its travels, Broadway producer David Richenthal (“The Kentucky Cycle,” “Present Laughter”) decided to drop the original cast and director and search for a new creative team.
Foote shuns talking about this unpleasant business; but Richenthal says, “I felt the Signature version was fine for a tiny theater. It established the play. But I felt the production could be better.”
Richenthal then asked Robert Falls to take over, an offer the Goodman’s artistic director at first refused. Richenthal persisted, however, and after reading and “falling in love with” Foote’s script, Falls says, he met with the playwright and agreed to direct the production for a spring, 1997, opening on Broadway, after an initial engagement at the Goodman.
Richenthal’s next move was to have the production arrive in New York under terms of the Broadway Alliance, a system designed to encourage new plays that otherwise might have a hard time making it in the Broadway marketplace.
Under terms of the Alliance, all parties in the production, including the craft unions, agree to work at a reduced rate in order to keep costs down and give the show’s backers a better shot at recouping their investment. Star salaries are capped at $2,500 a week, and Actors Equity minimum salaries are cut by 25 percent. Ticket prices are pegged at $45, tops.
If and when the show moves into profitability, there is a 10 percent pool of the profits that the participants are able to share.
For its part, Goodman gets a small percentage of the gross right from the start. The theater, which put up the money for the Goodman presentation, also gets money from selling its physical production to the Broadway producers.
Richenthal chose this route for the play, rather than opening it in an off Broadway house, because, he says, “It’s a quality work that deserves to be seen on Broadway.”
To qualify as a Broadway Alliance offering, a production, besides artistic merit, must have a budget under $750,000, which usually means a small-cast, one-setting show. “Young Man” just barely qualifies under those guidelines. It has nine actors and two settings.
Also, a Broadway house set aside by theater owners as an Alliance venue must be available. In this instance, the Longacre Theatre was free, and that is where “The Young Man From Atlanta” is to open March 27, after it closes its Goodman run March 1.
The track record for Broadway Alliance productions is spotty. Many have failed, despite the allowances, but two notable successes are Terrence McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Master Class.”
As for “The Young Man From Atlanta,” Richenthal says, “If we run at 80 percent capacity for six weeks, we’ll make back the investment.”
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THE FACTS
`The Young Man From Atlanta’
When: Monday through March 1; previews Sunday
Where: Goodman Theatre, 200 S. Columbus Drive
Tickets: $26-$39
Call: 312-443-3800
