Revisiting the South of Southern Playwrights

Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote. By Laurin Porter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, June, 2003. x + 233 pages. $49.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Horton Foote: A Literary Biography. By Charles S. Watson. Austin: U of Texas P, May, 2003. x + 277 pages. $29.95.

Paul Green: Playwright of the Real South. By John Herbert Roper. Athens: U of Georgia P, August, 2003. xiii + 320 pages. $34.95.

Paul Green and Horton Foote share an appreciation of folk and regional art. Of the two, Green is more accurately described as a regionalist, as plays such as Wilderness Road (in Berea, Kentucky) and Cross and Sword (in Saint Augustine, Florida) express political themes through place-specific stories and characters. Except for a few of his film adaptations, Foote also stages a compelling sense of place; his home is coastal southeast Texas, with Wharton/Harrison as its mythical center. The affinity between the writers is further implied by Foote's appearing as an actor in a 1935 production of Green's The No'Count Boy and his study of Green as a representative regionalist (along with Lynn Riggs and E. P. Conkle) during Foote's membership with the American Actors Company in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As these three new biographies make clear, however, the two writers represent different versions of the South, used for substantially divergent dramatic ends.

Laurin Porter's Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote will be the most engaging for students of theater art. Using persuasive details from Foote's major work, the nine-play cycle The Orphans' Home, Porter shows that Foote transforms the language, characters, and stories of his Texas place into a drama that is finally personal, not simply historical and regional. According to Porter, Foote is less a Texas cowboy than a Deep South writer, asserting the role of family and community in identity formation. Like William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O'Connor, Foote is southern and mythic because he designs a theater which seeks psychological, social, and even religious patterns of value and meaning. Without being fully conscious of their needs, his characters seek redemption through loving connection, not cold assertion of their isolated will.

This vision is shaped by Horton Foote's instinctive use of musical patterns, Orphans' Home convincingly argues. Rather than rely on traditional plot or symbol, Foote weaves images, words, and folklore around the central need of his characters: courage to face the past. According to Porter, the repetition of these dramatic pieces becomes melodic, forming a point/counterpoint exploration of the many voices which constitute a family/community. In the process, Porter has written an essential text for anyone interested in how a playwright uses his southern materials to serve his idiosyncratic style. This book is also well designed and accurate, supplemented by a useful chronology of the stories and characters. Throughout, Porter writes clear academic prose. Her arguments are well supported and free of sentiment and pedantry.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Charles Watson's "literary biography" of Foote. It covers much of the same biographical ground as Porter's study of The Orphans' Home (and Marion Castleberry's seminal work on Foote's life). It has a similar chronology, genealogy, and selective bibliography, all useful to Foote scholars. And Horton Foote: A Literary Biography presents an overview of Foote's life, with sympathy and respect. But this book lacks a unifying focus on Foote's life, his plays, or the influence of Texas on his work, despite being written for a series on "Texas history, life, and culture." Consequently, it seems cluttered, not illuminated, by its many references to theater history, world events, even gossipy comments by Foote's friends and agent. The result is a readable but scrambled book, lacking the coherence and development of Porter's study.

Although his discussions of Foote's work are generally accurate, Watson can sometimes be...