Estate Planning with Horton Foote
Portrait of a Small Town
Horton Foote left Wharton, Texas, 75 years ago, but he remembers everything—and then some—from his childhood days clerking in his father’s dry goods store. “My Lord have mercy, I’m a fifth generation [Whartonite], so I’m fascinated by it,” says the soft-spoken Foote, who used the town, renamed Harrison, as the setting for most of his plays. “I’ve been on this earth a long time, and I’ve spent much more of my life outside Wharton than in it. But I carry Wharton in my mind, and I’m always eager to go back.”
Doted on by his extended family, “Little Horton” graduated from high school at 16 and set out by bus a year later in the height of the Depression to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He spent a decade as an actor, first in California and then in New York, and eventually began writing sketches inspired by memories of home. “I don’t think a writer chooses what he is going to write about,” Foote says of basing his work on his relatives, many of whom led fairly dysfunctional lives. “I think it chooses you.” When critic Brooks Atkinson praised the young playwright’s script but not his acting in the 1941 off-Broadway mounting of Texas Town, Foote decided to commit himself to writing.
"And the Oscar Goes To..."
Movie buffs know Horton Foote not as the writer of 60 plays but as a two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. His first Oscar came in 1963 for adapting Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. “I talk to Harper all the time,” Foote says of the reclusive Alabama author. “I love her.” Oscar #2 came for his memorable 1983 original screenplay for Tender Mercies, a Netflix must-see starring Robert Duvall Mockingbird’s Boo Radley as an alcoholic country singer with stage favorite Betty Buckley as his ex-wife. A third Oscar nomination came two years later for the adaptation of his best-known play, The Trip to Bountiful, directed for the screen by his cousin, Peter Masterson.
Despite his film success, Foote never moved to Hollywood: He and his wife, Lillian, and their four children including playwright Daisy and Dividing the Estate star Hallie made their home in Nyack, NY, and later in New Hampshire. “We didn’t visit Texas a lot, but I was raised on my dad’s stories, so I was influenced by all of that,” says Hallie, whose real-life speaking voice is nothing like the pitch-perfect drawl she uses in her father’s plays. “His writing is deceptively simple—and even though he writes about this very specific small town in Texas, he somehow touches on all sorts of universal themes. He’s got a great ear, and he writes great parts for actors.”
Foote’s dialogue is notable for the undercurrents of emotion beneath its polite, correct exterior, a quality critics have likened to Chekhov. “He’s influenced by many writers,” says Hallie, “certainly Chekhov, and a lot of poets. He loves Ezra Pound; he loves Elizabeth Bishop. He loves the stories of Katharine Anne Porter. People have compared him to Beckett—he loves Beckett! He listened to the music of composer Charles Ives a lot when he was working on the ‘Orphans’ Home Cycle,’” a series of nine autobiographical plays written in the 1970s. “It goes all over the map with him.”
Hitting His Prime at 80
Playwrights rarely maintain their creative vitality for decades, though Foote and Edward Albee who, ironically, once lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment building are notable exceptions. As Foote’s agent pointed out to New York Times Magazine writer Alex Witchel in a 2007 profile, “A playwright’s career is usually 10 to 15 good years, even Tennessee Williams. It’s a specific period of time, like opera singers. But Horton gets better and better.”
At age 79, Foote won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta just after off-Broadway’s Signature Theater Company devoted a season to his work. The next decade brought a flurry of productions in New York—The Traveling Lady, The Day Emily Married, The Carpetbagger’s Children and an acclaimed revival of The Trip to Bountiful starring Lois Smith—that reminded theatergoers of Foote’s unique gift for conveying the often heartbreaking ways people search for connections and deal with setbacks.
"He is not a social protester like Arthur Miller, a constant experimenter with dramatic techniques like Eugene O’Neill, nor a psychological investigator like Tennessee Williams,” Foote’s biographer Charles Watson wrote. “Rather it is his sensitivity to the troubled men and women who live in Southeast Texas that gives his work unity.”
Where There's a Will...
Who would have guessed that a play written during America’s last economic downturn 20 years ago would seem like déjà vu in the fall of 2008? The very title of Dividing the Estate is part of the joke: Will a family whose members have been borrowing for years against the value of their home and farm have anything left to divide if they convince their strong-willed Mama to loosen the purse strings?
“I get nervous when I think about how exact certain [economic] observations are in the play,” Foote says with amusement. “I’m glad I didn’t write it after all this turmoil in Washington.” Hallie Foote, who gives an award-worthy comic performance as the most self-centered daughter imaginable, says of the play’s prescience, “It gets more and more freaky as the days go by,” though, she notes, family feuds over money strike a universal chord. In Primary Stages’ first New York production last fall, critics hailed Dividing the Estate as one of Foote’s funniest plays, filled with schemers of “endearing ineffectuality,” as Times critic Ben Brantley put it.
Dividing the Estate is only the eighth play by Horton Foote to make it to Broadway since 1944, a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him. “Every production is sacred in its own way,” he says, “and I think you work just as hard off-Broadway as you do on Broadway.” Foote ticks off the play’s 19-year road to the Great White Way: “McCarter [in Princeton], Cleveland [at the Great Lakes Theater Festival], then we did the same production down in North Carolina.” Rediscovered by director Michael Wilson and rejiggered by Foote, the play is being brought to Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater with its entire 13-member original off-Broadway cast.
Ask Foote about Wharton/Harrison today, and he wistfully recalls Saturdays in the 1920s when cotton farmers and field hands swarmed into his father’s store. “All that has changed—the town is as empty now on Saturday as it is on Sunday.” With a naughty chuckle, he adds, “Someone said to me, ‘I wanted to give a homecoming party for you, but I went to a friend and she said, ‘Who are you going to get to come? They’re all in the graveyard!’” But not Foote, the 92-year-old devotee of Iyengar yoga with two screenplays in pre-production and a big Broadway opening coming up.