Genesis of an American Playwright (review)

Growing up in the town of Wharton in the Gulf Coast region of Texas, playwright Horton Foote learned to listen: "The same stories were told over and over again, and I was never tired of listening to them" (90). Reading this collection of twenty-four of Foote's essays and lectures provides a similar experience of pleasurable listening to oft-repeated stories.

Marion Castleberry has ably arranged and edited the pieces into five sections that each represents "a unique and important aspect of Foote's career and art." In the process, at Foote's request, he tried to remove as many repetitive comments as possible. Yet much repetition of anecdotes remains, and the experience of reading the book straight through recapitulates Foote's claim that the Southern storytelling tradition still exists: "Only, the storytellers are different now. Instead of my mother and father, and my great-aunts and great-uncles, or my grandparents, I am telling the stories to my nieces and nephews, and my great-nieces and great-nephews" (71). The reader feels included in this family circle by Foote's gentle wisdom and the unpretentiousness of his voice on these pages. The repetitions create familiarity and intimacy, as Foote recounts his stories with slight variations in the shifting contexts of the various pieces.

In the first section,"Genesis of a Playwright," the stories are autobiographical accounts of Foote's growing up in Wharton, becoming a student at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1933 at the age of seventeen, and finding his way to New York in 1936 to start a career as an actor and playwright. This section prefigures in digest form Foote's two volumes of memoirs, Farewell and Beginnings. Of particular interest is his account of his work as a playwright with the American Actors Company and his interaction with dancers such as Agnes DeMille, Martha Graham, and Valerie Bettis in the exploration of lyric, nonrealistic theatrical styles.

In the book's second section, "On Being a Southern Writer," Foote explores the regional roots of his storytelling impulse. In an excellent—and previously unpublished—1997 essay, "Things Have Ends and Beginnings," Foote recounts the evolution of his style as a playwright, retelling the moment when he discovered the kind of writer he wished to be:

I was married by then, and my wife and I went to Washington, DC to start a theater dedicated to the new and the experimental. Even then, all my plays had their roots in some experience or story I had heard or known in Wharton, but they were abstract and written non-realistically. I experimented for five years. Then one day, something spoke to me as it had when I was eleven [and had the call to be an actor], and it said to stop. This wasn't for me. Basically, I was a storyteller and I wanted to speak with clarity and narrative interest. (94)

The result of this decision was a major body of work that has been awarded two Academy Awards for screenwriting and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Of particular interest to theatre studies are the third and fifth sections of the book, "Writing for the Stage" and "Thoughts on the American Theater." The former section includes a substantial essay on Foote's masterful nine-play Orphans' Home Cycle and two avuncular pieces of useful advice for aspiring playwrights. Among several short pieces are one from 1944 expressing a bleak view of theatrical dance on Broadway, and one from 1986 extolling the virtues of the one-act play form. In another short piece from 1952, Foote succinctly sums up his plays "as a moral and social history" of a fictionalized version of small towns in Texas. "The town is not Wharton," he claims. "It is a town of my imagination" (100). Implicitly expressed in this statement is a kinship with the work of William Faulkner, who also based a fictional world on his native environs and...