Drawing from life, with both Footes in

Volume 1, Number 52 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | September 14 - 20, 2007

Chelsea: Arts & Lifestyles: Theater

Playwright Horton Foote and daughter Hallie, who appears in the New York premiere of his play, “Dividing the Estate.” It begins previews on Tuesday.

By JERRY TALLMER

Horton Foote has flown the coop. “Rent!” he says with a shudder. “It kept going up, got so high I couldn’t afford it. Eighteen years I’d been there,” he says of the apartment in the far-west Village where he and his wife Lillian thought they would live out their days, and she did live out hers.

Pulitzer- and double Oscar-winner Foote now lives in digs shared with his actress daughter and her actor husband in Pacific Palisades, California. “Good rent, right by the beach, very pleasant.” It is hard not to sense a shade of urban regret behind all that. You can take the 91-year-old out of Greenwich Village, but you can’t take Greenwich Village out of the 91-year-old.

Can’t stop him from writing plays, either — warm, believable, tough-truth plays, almost all of them set an hour or so from Houston in a small town given the fictional name of Harrison, Texas, for the sake of friends, foes, family, and Foote’s own skin. Except I don’t think Horton has any foes.

It was a lot more than 18 years ago that Horton Foote of Wharton, Texas, first hit New York City and Greenwich Village, bound and determined to become an actor, with time out as an elevator man for survival.

If not an actor? Okay, then, a playwright. His first crack at it, “Texas Town,” was done Off-Broadway in 1941, before there was an Off-Broadway. We have been deeply in debt to him ever since.

Horton is back in town now, this town, not for the latest thing he’s been writing — about a tax assessor who is sorry for the assessed — but for rehearsals toward the New York City premiere, September 27 at 59E59 Theaters (previews start September 18), of a work of 20 years ago that’s been staged all over the U.S. but never here.

This is “Dividing the Estate,” and a more exact title could not exist. That’s exactly what the play is about: the land-poor, far-flung, but overworked fields and fine old house and grounds that the grown children of imperious, erratic old Stella Gordon (Elizabeth Ashley) are already squabbling over and wanting to sell — or not wanting to sell, to the oil-well hawks — even as her powers of memory are slipping away.

But not too far away, mind you. She is still a keen enough observer of the deteriorating Texas gulf scene to say, of what was once a milieu of grace and elegance: “Just look at what is surrounding us. Fruit markets and fast-food restaurants. That’s what happens when you sell your land.”

Penny Fuller plays one of her daughters, the loyal, gabby Lucille; Gerald McRaney is the wastrel 50-year-old son, Lewis, in dire need of mucho cash now; and Stella’s other daughter, Mary Jo, sharp as a tack and even more pressingly in need of money, is played by Hallie Foote, daughter of Horton Foote, an enriching presence in many of his works.

Arthur French, a fine actor as far back as I can remember, plays Doug Alexander, the demanding 91-year-old (Horton’s age) black man who’s been with this family all his life. The thankless job of managing the estate, protecting the estate from Mary Jo, et al. — the Uncle Vanya job — has devolved on Stella’s grandson, Son Gordon. That’s his first name, Son. “Well, that’s all I ever heard him called,” says playwright Foote when you press him on the oddness of it.

Son, played by Hallie’s husband, Devon Abner, has a fiancée — a schoolteacher — who’s a little too crisp and politically correct for the rest of this clan. “I think it can be exciting, and a challenge to us all,” the young woman says when it turns out that inheritance taxes may force all these people into some sort of long-term communal existence in this very house. “We can be like the Korean and Vietnamese families moving into Houston, and all over the coast – they live together, they work together.”

“Well,” is Mary Jo’s crisp response, “I’m neither Korean or Taiwanese, thank you.”

“Mary Jo’s a complication,” says the Hallie Foote who plays her. “When I start working on one of his [her father’s] plays, I begin to hear people I’ve met. And sometimes I feel like Mary Jo.”

Except that you’ve read “The Grapes of Wrath.” [Mary Jo pretends to have read it, but she hasn’t.]

“I’ve read it, but I never read ‘Gone With the Wind’ ” [which Mary Jo did read]. “I did see the movie,” says Hallie Foote. “My Nana – my grandmother – drove me to see it in New Hampshire when I was 17.”

New Hampshire is where Horton Foote retreated for some years when he was fed up with the crassness of television, movies, Broadway, and even Off-Broadway. Mercifully for us all, he came back.

“Dividing the Estate,” written 1987, is full of passing observation of the changing scene in Harrison, Texas:

movie theaters gone (like “The Last Picture Show”), shops and stores gone, restaurants gone, oil wells in, VCRs in, computers in, plastics factory in, McDonald’s in, Whataburgers in —

“That’s where we’re all going to wind up,” says Hallie with a hollow laugh. “Working for Whataburger.” She feels her father was predictive here of many things to come. “All you have to do is change VCRs to DVDs.”

Horton well remembers when the Texas gulf region was deep in an oil-price-bust depression, and Michael Wilson, director of this show, who was working at the Alley Theater at the time, just as vividly remembers when there was tumbleweed blowing down the streets and sidewalks of Houston.

All his life Horton Foote, the creator, has drawn on life. “All my things,” he says, “are based on people. I mix them up.”

A case in point is that of Doug Alexander, the old black man whose petulance is taken as a matter of course by this white family of which he is a de facto member, and whose death in mid-play is mourned by them as formally and sincerely as if he were one of their own.

“This is the story of my great aunt’s life,” says playwright Foote. “She didn’t know I was using it. She’s gone to her reward, so it doesn’t matter.

“There was this black woman who would come in and cook for her. When that woman died, my great aunt raised that woman’s son along with her own two sons, and he became part of the family. Nobody made a big deal of it, though it was still a segregated society, and the [black] boy had to go to public school instead of private school. Still, it was a remarkable thing.”

May we know your great aunt’s name?

“Noooo,” said Horton Foote, a finger pressed against his lips.

You can take the boy out of Wharton, Texas, but not — certainly not — all the way out. Write on, pahdner.

DIVIDING THE ESTATE. By Horton Foote. Directed by Michael Wilson. A Primary Stages production entering previews September 18 toward its September 27 opening at 59E59 Theaters, at that address, (212) 279-4200, or www.TicketCentral.com.