At 92, Horton Foote's back on Broadway
THEATER
The Texas-born playwright's new work, 'Dividing the Estate,' marks his first return since the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Young Man From Atlanta' in 1997.
Reporting from New York — Horton Foote is sitting patiently in an orchestra seat at the Booth Theatre on Broadway before a Wednesday matinee of "Dividing the Estate." He's waiting to be interviewed but seems content just to stare at the set of the genteel family residence, the source of his economically strapped characters' squabbling and backbiting.
There's a look of concern on his face, but ask him what he's thinking about and he'll say he's just amazed by his good fortune. "I can't get over the fact that I can go into many places in New York, and people know who I am," he says. "I never really know who I am myself. I'm impressed by that."
At 92, Foote cuts a gentlemanly figure of somber serenity. Elegantly bundled in a sweater and overcoat, he exudes an uncommon grace and compassion for someone who has survived as long as he has in the treacherous shoals of the American theater. If there are scars, he isn't flaunting them. Talking to him one-on-one amid sound checks and other distractions, you can feel his vision concentrating on you, absorbing your peculiar individuality the way an animal lover will stop and stare at a strange cat walking through a garden. Yet his gaze seems on loan from the higher precincts of memory and imagination, the forces that have combined in him to produce a distinguished body of work that has grown only richer with time.
This is Foote's first play on Broadway since his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Young Man From Atlanta" in 1997. But you wouldn't know it from his manner, which is as steady, sensitive and slyly humorous as any of his dramas that have chronicled the hope and heartbreak of that little corner of Texas he long ago rechristened "Harrison." (As literary ZIP Codes go, Harrison, Texas, is as well-mapped as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.)
"When I first tried writing a play, I was so naive I didn't know that you couldn't use the actual names," Foote recalls. "So I wrote a one-act called 'Wharton Dance' and used all of my friends' names. Some of them were doing things their parents didn't know they did. No one told me that you couldn't do this. I thought they'd be delighted, but they weren't delighted, so I quickly changed the name of Wharton to Harrison."
From Texas to Pasadena
- He's Put Out Over Judging Playwrights by Output Jun 10, 2002
- Foote Steps In, Event Steps Out Apr 25, 2001
- New Improv at South Coast Repertory: The Marriage of Festival, Construction Feb 22, 2002
