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Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle
Makes Epic Journey from Page to Stage
How can human beings stand all that comes to them? How can they?
- Horace Robedaux, The Orphans' Home Cycle
For over seventy years on stage, television, and film, Horton Foote chronicled lives of yearning, hope, fear, and quiet desperation, most of which played out in the fictional small town of Harrison, Texas. His plays have often been called "quotidian" in their subject matter of small-town Texas life, and their characters and concerns deemed simple. But throughout his writing career, which began in the early 1940s as a resident playwright for the American Actors Company, he has wrestled with large, grand themes and questions of American life. A longing for home, a sense of place, and the need to re-capture or escape from the past suffuses much of his work, whether it is Laura Lee Weems' obsession with having a house of her own in Night Seasons, Carrie Watts' desire to return home in The Trip to Bountiful, or Alberta Thornton, haunted by her history, in The Last of the Thorntons. Others are the victims of change, such as the Thompson sisters in The Carpetbagger's Children, or the Gordon family of Dividing the Estate, who find their places as scions of Southern aristocracy coming to a close in the face of the harsh economic realities of the depressions of the 1930s and 1980s. Running through all of his work is Foote's preoccupation with identity, the mysterious forces that shape us and make us who we are, as well as our ability (or inability) to live through change.
Nowhere are these themes and questions more prevalent than The Orphans' Home Cycle, Foote's nine-play family saga which encompasses the entirety of Signature's 2009-2010 Horton Foote Legacy Season, a co-production with Connecticut's Hartford Stage. Hartford Stage Artistic Director Michael Wilson directs the cycle. The Orphans' Home Cycle chronicles the childhood, coming of age, and adulthood of Horace Robedaux, a character whom Foote based heavily on his father, Albert Horton Foote. The cycle begins when twelve-year-old Horace's world is upended by the death of his own father and departure of his mother and younger sister for Houston, leaving him in Harrison with his parents' feuding families, the Robedauxs and Thorntons. Over the course of the nine plays, Horace embarks on an epic search for a home and family, taking him from Harrison to a remote plantation sustained by convict labor, to Houston, and back to his hometown, where he falls in love but must prove his worth to his bride's patrician family. Taking place between 1902 and 1928 in a South still reeling from the devastating effects of the Civil War, the plays unfold against a historic backdrop of some of the country's most dramatic and momentous events, including World War I, the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and the onset of the Great Depression.
As he has with much of his work, Foote culled the source material for The Orphans' Home Cycle from the lives and stories of the residents of his hometown of Wharton, Texas (the basis for Harrison), many of whom were his own relations. Foote spoke of the origins of the plays in a 1993 lecture published in the book, Genesis of an American Playwright: "They began, really when as a child, I asked questions of my family, about their past, for most of the plays of the cycle are set in a time before I was born. I am not sure at all when I first heard the stories that form the plots of the plays, but I heard variations of these stories endlessly while I was growing up."
Foote's first attempt to tell his father's story was in 1960 when he wrote The Night of the Storm (later titled Roots in a Parched Ground, the first play of The Orphans' Home Cycle), as a teleplay for the "DuPont Show of the Month," basing it on his father's early childhood. "My grandfather actually saw it and was quite touched by it," recalls Foote's daughter, actress Hallie Foote, during rehearsals for the cycle in Hartford. "He recognized it as his story. My father put it away in a drawer, although there was this critic whom he was very close to named Stark Young, who loved it. He loved the character of Horace, he loved the story, and he always said, 'You should go back to that and do something with it.' So I think that always stuck in my father's mind."
In 1974 after the deaths of his parents, Foote followed Young's advice and began a series of plays inspired by his father's childhood and subsequent courtship of and marriage to Foote's mother, Harriet (Hallie) Brooks. Foote had already made a name for himself as a playwright on Broadway, as a television writer for shows such as the "Goodyear Television Playhouse," "Philco Television Playhouse," "Playhouse 90," and "Studio One," and for his Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. But at the time, he was separated from the film and theatre establishments of Los Angeles and New York and living in New Boston, New Hampshire with his wife, Lillian Vallish Foote, and their four children, Hallie, Horton, Jr., Walter, and Daisy. He wrote the plays out of sequence and by 1976 had completed eight: Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, Lily Dale, Courtship, Valentine's Day, 1918, Cousins, and The Death of Papa. He later added a ninth play, The Widow Claire, which takes place between Lily Dale and Courtship. Upon its completion, Foote named his opus The Orphans' Home Cycle after the line, "The world's an orphan's home," from Marianne Moore's poem, "In Distrust of Merits."
In addition to his family stories, music also played a strong role in Foote's inspiration and composition of The Orphans' Home Cycle. Popular songs of the day featured in the cycle include "Waltz Me Around Again, Willie," "Darling Nellie Grey," and "After the Ball," as well as American folk songs such as "Lily Dale" and convict work songs, "Rock Island Line" and "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos." Foote was also heavily influenced by the sound of American composer Charles Ives, whose music he listened to throughout the period he wrote the plays. "Ives became a major motif and inspiration for Horton in how he captured popular music of the time but in a dissonant, discordant way," says Michael Wilson, adding that the score of this production of The Orphans' Home Cycle will have an "Ivesian" influence, with original music by composer and sound designer John Gromada.
Following his completion of the cycle in the late 1970s, Foote directed and workshopped three of the plays, Courtship, Valentine's Day, and 1918, in New York at Herbert Berghof's HB Playwrights Foundation. These productions not only heralded a return of Foote to the New York scene after a long absence, but the debut of Hallie Foote, who created the role of Elizabeth Robedaux, the character based on her grandmother, and later the title character in The Widow Claire at Circle in the Square. Horton and Lillian Foote also produced independent films of Courtship, Valentine's Day, and 1918 which featured not only Hallie Foote but her siblings Horton Foote, Jr. and Daisy Foote, as well as Matthew Broderick and William Converse-Roberts as Horace Robedaux. Productions of the majority of the cycle plays have been seen on stage, film, and television, including a feature film of Convicts starring Robert Duvall, Lukas Haas, and James Earl Jones.
Although Foote wrote The Orphans' Home Cycle plays to stand on their own as individual works, he had always hoped to see all nine performed together as a whole. In 2007, Hartford Stage commissioned Foote to adapt them into nine one-act plays to be performed in three installments. As Foote's commission neared completion, Hartford Stage and Signature Theatre Company united as co-producers to present all nine plays on their respective stages during the 2009-2010 Season. Foot finished drafts of all nine plays shortly before his passing on March 4, 2009.
Wilson first worked with Foote on the premiere of The Death of Papa, the final play of the cycle, in 1997 at PlayMakers Repertory Company in North Carolina, and has gone on to direct several more of his plays, including The Trip to Bountiful at Hartford Stage, The Carpetbagger's Children at Lincoln Center, and the Tony-nominated Dividing the Estate at New York's Primary Stages and on Broadway. "For me, it's just been a thrill and a great honor to go on this journey," he says of the cycle. "Horton writes out of such love and compassion with such an unflinching eye towards the troubles, the joys, and the tragedies of the human experience. It unfolds in front of your eyes and you can't help but relate it to your own life, your family life, your loved ones, and it truly stops your heart."
Pat Bowie, Charles Turner, Henry Hodges,
Leon Addison Brown and James DeMarse
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Wilson directs a cast of twenty-two actors in over sixty roles, many of whom are frequent inhabitants of Horton Foote's world, as well as alumni of Signature Theatre Company. Hallie Foote, who has appeared in five of the six plays Signature has produced by her father, will play an assortment of roles in the cycle, including the mother of the role she created in the late 1970s. Joining her are fellow Signature alumni Devon Abner (Horton Foote's Night Seasons, The Young Man from Atlanta, and The Trip to Bountiful), Leon Addison Brown (Adrienne Kennedy's The Alexander Plays and August Wilson's Two Trains Running), James DeMarse (The Trip to Bountiful), Gilbert Owuor (Leslie Lee's The First Breeze of Summer), Pamela Payton-Wright (Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July), composer and sound designer John Gromada (Lee Blessing's Thief River and Fifth of July), projection designer Jan Hartley (Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz), and choreographer and movement director Peter Pucci (Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss, Charles Mee's Queens Boulevard and Paradise Park). Signature welcomes actors Pat Bowie, Justin Fuller, Jasmine Amii Harrison, Bill Heck, Henry Hodges, Georgi James, Annalee Jefferies, Virginia Kull, Maggie Lacey, Jenny Dare Paulin, Bryce Pinkham, Stephen Plunkett, Lucas Caleb Rooney, Dylan Riley Snyder, Charles Turner, set designers Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber, costume designer David C. Woolard, lighting designer Rui Rita, and hair and wig designer Mark Adam Rampmeyer, all of whom make their Signature debuts with The Orphans' Home Cycle.
"We have extraordinary people who've made this very intense commitment and they're bringing everything they have to the table," says Signature Founding Artistic Director James Houghton during rehearsals for the cycle. "Hallie is, without question, the interpreter of Horton's work. Every character she's ever played has been incredibly nuanced, beautifully rendered, and has appeared effortless when in fact it's incredibly challenging to bring Horton's characters to life. Michael has been a champion of Horton's for many years, is a terrific interpreter of the work, and is someone I know Horton cherished and cared about deeply. It's a pleasure to partner with Hartford and have our two passions for this American writer come together and be able to make this incredibly challenging and robust and piece, The Orphans' Home Cycle, come to life. I know Horton would be thrilled to be sitting in those rehearsals and delighted with what's going on."
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