Horton Foote is talking about the great American theatrical triumvirate of Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Arthur Miller. They were his peers.
Williams was born in 1911. Inge, 1913. Miller, 1915. And Foote, 1916. In Wharton, small-town Texas.
Williams, Inge and Miller are all dead. Foote is very much alive. And still writing. And currently hanging around the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, supervising the rehearsal of several of his plays as part of the Goodman’s Horton Foote Festival.
“Those boys were spoiled,” Foote says of those playwriting greats, employing his gentle Texan drawl. “They all had their shows up on Broadway straight away. They won Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes immediately. I was different. I’ve won almost all of those same prizes over the years, but I’ve also seen them come and go.”
It’s difficult to encapsulate Foote’s astonishingly long writing career, a body of work that includes early teleplays, Academy Award-winning screenplays, a couple of dozen full-length plays and many one-acts. Throughout most of his 91 years, he has enjoyed a steady stream of work, a measure of critical acclaim across several decades for plays such as “The Widow Claire,” “Lily Dale” and “The Young Man From Atlanta,” and multifarious accolades. This gentlemanly Texan has long enjoyed the widespread respect of those who work in theater, film and television. One struggles to find anyone who does not speak well of the man or admire his beating heart or his long-lived turn of a genteel phrase.
But even though he was very much around when an American writer could still become a household name, he never became one. His name is familiar, but vaguely. Outside those who follow theater closely, few could name the title of one of Foote’s dramas. He’s rarely taught in college courses on American literature. And even within the artistic ranks, he has perhaps never fully been accepted as a truly great American playwright.
“Horton has always operated in large part under the radar,” says James Houghton, the artistic director of New York’s Signature Theatre, which produced a season of Foote’s plays in the mid-1990s. “He has been very much underappreciated. He still is.”
“I suppose,” says the New York-based director Henry Wishcamper, who directed the exquisite current Goodman production of Foote’s “Talking Pictures,” “he used to be considered a middle-of-the-pack writer.”
Unlike Williams, who had “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Inge, who had “Bus Stop,” and Miller, who had “Death of a Salesman,” Foote never had a breakout play. His Oscar-winning “To Kill a Mockingbird” screenplay is regarded by many as his greatest achievement, but that was an adaptation of an iconic novel. People may say they love Foote’s plays in general, but there is no marquee title upon which to hang.
Except, perhaps, for “The Trip to Bountiful,” an emotional piece about an old woman who wants to visit the town of her birth, and the next show in the Goodman’s Foote Festival. But that title only really seeped into the popular consciousness after Peter Masterson’s 1985 movie starring Geraldine Page and John Heard. Incredibly, the play upon which Foote based his screenplay was written in 1953 and actually began life as a teleplay.
That kind of delayed reaction — delayed by decades — shows up time and again with Foote’s work. Take the play “Dividing the Estate,” a shrewdly observed piece about a greedy, quarrelsome Texas family facing death and wealth all at once. The drama received sudden critical acclaim when produced last December by New York’s Primary Stages. As a result, the play is expected on Broadway in the fall. But to Foote followers in the Midwest, the play was old news. It was looking good back in 1990, when it was produced in Cleveland by the Great Lakes Theatre Festival. It only took 20 years for New York to notice the wisdom of a writer who has long had to fight back against the deadly twin charges of sentimentalism and provincialism.
Deceptive subtlety
Nonetheless, critics and audiences clearly are now realizing that Foote’s plays, which mostly are set decades ago in fictional Harrison, Texas, contain a great deal of contemporary lucidity. “Talking Pictures,” for example, has much to say about the agonies of modern-day technological transition. “Dividing the Estate” points to many of the fissures in 21st Century America. And “A Trip to Bountiful” opines eloquently on the psychic effects of our loss of an American sense of place.
Houghton argues that it just takes a long time for Americans to appreciate subtlety.
“A lot of Horton’s work is Chekhovian. He reflects on quiet moments that add up to the significant moments. He has what appears to be a gentle touch and a quiet voice, but if you really dig deep there is huge turbulence and profound storms in his work,” says Houghton. “He says everything with such economy. But his plays take your breath away.”
“I think he’s really got more in common with American novelists than other playwrights,” says Wishcamper. “He provides the kind of descriptive details you find in great novels. And there is great wisdom to the way he chronicles change. He can show you a thousand small changes taking place in someone’s life. With each of them, something is lost that they’ll never get again. But there’s also a sense of renewal and rebirth.”
‘Miraculous events’
That’s a pretty apt description of Foote’s biography. Although he never really left small-town Texas on the page, he left it in life at a young age. At 16, he took off to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.
“My parents had never been out of Texas and only rarely out of Wharton,” Foote says. “My father took the last money he had and sent me off to Pasadena. And there began a series of miraculous events that I couldn’t plan.”
Those events took Foote, who initially saw himself as an actor, to New York, where he plunged into the theatrical ferment of the late 1930s. He ended up in a theatrical improvisation class taught by the legendary Agnes De Mille. “She asked me if I’d ever thought about writing a play and told me that she thought I should,” Foote says. “‘Write what you know,’ she said, and that’s what I did. Maybe I took her too literally.”
Foote wrote for many of the leading television shops in the 1950s, including “Playhouse 90.” His star rose and fell over the years. Foote’s “Mockingbird” success came in 1962 but that was followed by a period of disillusionment, during which Foote moved to New Hampshire in what many saw as a self-imposed exile from Hollywood and New York. In the experimental 1960s, he was widely regarded as old hat. But Robert Duvall, who had starred in the careermaking “Mockingbird” remained committed to Foote. Foote liked writing for Duvall. And in 1983, both Foote and Duvall won Oscars for “Tender Mercies.”
By then Foote already was past the usual retirement age, but he had to wait another 12 years, when “The Young Man From Atlanta” came on the scene, before he won the Pulitzer Prize. Directed by Robert Falls at the Goodman, “Atlanta” went on to Broadway. But then Foote seemed to disappear again into that small-town vortex.
Writes compulsively
Foote now lives in California with his daughter, Hallie Foote (who appears in the Goodman cast of “Trip to Bountiful”). He continues to write compulsively, he says. And he has lived to see himself return very much to fashion.
Foote, a shrewd self-observer, says that his lack of one iconic play perhaps served him well in the long haul.
“Tennessee was thrust into the most excruciating spotlight with ‘Glass Menagerie,'” he says. “After that, it was always ‘best that’ and ‘you’ve lost your touch.’ And Inge felt this torrent of fear or venom toward his agent, Audrey Wood, whom he felt was denigrating him. I just know both of those men had their hearts broken by the theater. And I had a different experience.”
Still, anyone pondering Foote’s career for the stage has to wonder why he has remained so tied to plays about rural life, decades ago, in small-town Texas. He has always written about going back and how you can’t go back; about the agony of loss and the necessity for it; about the people of a tiny community in an oft-forgotten corner of the nation.
“I know what you’re asking,” Foote says. “You’re asking, ‘Did I ever think of doing anything else?’ Well, here’s your answer: It wasn’t possible.”
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cjones5@tribune.com
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