But for the Texas clan of malcontents embodied with such itchy exuberance in the Primary Stages production that opened last night, directed by Michael Wilson, death is anything but ennobling.
Quarrelsome, greedy, gossipy and small-minded: what has always defined the Gordons of Harrison, Tex., glows all the brighter in the shadow of mortality. As Mr. Foote sees it, in the midst of death we are inescapably in life, with all its attendant pettiness.
Mr. Foote was clearly in close contact with his comic muse when he wrote “Estate,” which is having its New York premiere. During a career that spans at least 60 plays, most of them set in the claustrophobic Texas town of Harrison, Mr. Foote, now 91, has created many works that find the mordant humor in people’s inability to wrest what they want out of life.
But usually — as with “The Young Man From Atlanta,” his Pulitzer Prize winner from 1995, and “The Day Emily Married,” produced by Primary Stages in 2004 — the balance in his work tips toward a tone of laconic lamentation.
In “Dividing the Estate,” he shifts the weight to comedy with sprightly confidence. If Mr. Wilson’s production, which features an ensemble led by Elizabeth Ashley as the matriarch of the Gordons, doesn’t yet possess the same authority, it earns its laughs honestly. And it makes it clear that Mr. Foote’s authorial gaze is focused with satiric sharpness while retaining its elegiac sense of life’s transience.
Mr. Foote’s plots are almost always propelled by the frustrating of his characters’ deepest desires; his plays are all about being thwarted, which for him is the basic existential condition. Mostly what his characters want is simply a home of their own. (The title of his ambitious, generations-spanning “Orphan’s Home Cycle” of plays suggests just how futile that longing is.)
In “Dividing the Estate,” home has an undeniable physical reality, but for most of those who inhabit it, it’s more prison than sanctuary. (There’s a grim appropriateness about the institutional pristineness of Jeff Cowie’s set.) One of the few grand houses still standing in good repair in time-shrunken Harrison in 1987, it is ruled by the octogenarian Stella (Ms. Ashley), who keeps her aging children on a short financial leash. Understandably, they are starting to chafe.
The subject that preoccupies the Gordons in “Dividing the Estate” is exactly what its title promises. Stella’s fluttery daughter Lucille (Penny Fuller) — whose middle-aged son, known in typical Hortonese as Son (Devon Abner), manages the estate — is more or less content with the status quo. But her other children, Lewis (Gerald McRaney) and Mary Jo (the incomparable Hallie Foote), are making noises about wanting their economic independence.
In outline this plot is familiar, bringing to mind an assortment of American dramas set in the South and steamy with avarice and mendacity, from Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” to Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” What makes “Estate” so unmistakably a work of Horton Foote is the endearing ineffectuality of its schemers and the suggestion that the treasure chest everyone is after may be empty. Imagine Hellman’s foxes declawed, an alteration that automatically turns melodrama into comedy.
“Dividing the Estate” doesn’t have the mechanical precision of Hellman’s plotting. Mr. Foote has so many chickens coming home to roost all at once in the second act that the Gordon homestead starts to sound like an overpopulated henhouse.
Yet the authenticity of tone, poised like life between slapstick and tragedy, doesn’t falter. As always with Mr. Foote, even big events are folded into a conversational style that meanders like a lazy river, giving as much emphasis to the mundane as the monumental.
For a Southern-bred boy like me, listening to that talk really is like returning to my youth. If you haven’t been around such conversation, you won’t appreciate the exquisite accuracy of the maddening debates about genealogy and hymns, anecdotes about dietary quirks and questions like “Was she drunk when she had the accident?,” asked with genteel prurience.
That particular question is posed by Ms. Ashley, who has the requisite inflections down cold. She also nails the mixture of maternal indulgence and selfishness that makes Stella such a trial to her descendants. One caveat: She looks more like the sister than the mother of her children, and there are other instances of casting that seem confusingly age-inappropriate.
While a few of the supporting performances fail to grasp the mannered musicality of the dialogue, those of Mr. McRaney, Ms. Fuller, Ms. Foote (the playwright’s daughter) and Arthur French (as Doug, a 92-year-old family retainer) are first-rate.
As the alcoholic Lewis, Mr. McRaney, best known for his television work, beautifully combines the hangdog surliness and submissiveness that come from years of filial dependency.
Ms. Foote has appeared to splendid advantage in many of her father’s works, often as a passive soul hamstrung by her good manners and obedience to social custom. Here she plays the most aggressively grasping of Stella’s children with a mix of predatory fierceness and haplessness that becomes the play’s comic soul. Her repetition of a single sentence in the final scene is a priceless summing up of the seriously funny sadness of the entire family.
The sense of a way of life — and life itself — coming to an end, the sound of Baptist church chimes at midnight, pervades “Dividing the Estate,” as it does so much of Mr. Foote’s work. And Mr. Wilson allows this awareness to hover and grow in well-placed silences of Chekhovian substance.
Even as the culture that produced the Gordons disintegrates around them, though, Mr. Foote never denies the enduring vibrancy of their irritable and demanding natures. “Everything will be different now,” one character murmurs at the end of a scene. Not a chance. Which is bad news for him, but good news for theatergoers.
DIVIDING THE ESTATE
By Horton Foote; directed by Michael Wilson; sets by Jeff Cowie; costumes by David C. Woolard; lighting by Rui Rita; music and sound by John Gromada; fight director, B. H. Barry; production stage manager, Cole Bonenberger; production supervisor, PRF Productions; associate director, Max Williams; associate artistic director, Michelle Bossy. Presented by Primary Stages, Casey Childs, executive producer; Andrew Leynse, artistic director; Elliot Fox, managing director; in association with Jamie DeRoy. At the 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200. Through Oct. 27. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
WITH: Devon Abner (Son), Elizabeth Ashley (Stella), James DeMarse (Bob), Hallie Foote (Mary Jo), Arthur French (Doug), Penny Fuller (Lucille), Lynda Gravátt (Mildred), Virginia Kull (Irene), Maggie Lacey (Pauline), Nicole Lowrance (Sissie), Gerald McRaney (Lewis), Jenny Dare Paulin (Emily) and Keiana Richard (Cathleen).