By Harry Haun
24 Dec 2008
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| Hallie Foote |
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
In Dividing the Estate, Hallie Foote breathes life into another of playwright dad Horton Foote's multifaceted characters.
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Few actresses this side of Geraldine Page can say "Yes" and pull three syllables out of those three letters. But the woman playing Emily in Horton Foote's The Day Emily Married did just that in her first word when the play opened at Primary Stages in 2004. Her long, lazy twang screamed Harrison, TX the fictional facsimile of Foote's hometown of Wharton, TX.
The actress behind this feat is herself a Foote the author's daughter, Hallie born in Manhattan 55 years ago and brought up "northern" in Nyack and New Hampshire. "I've never lived in Texas," Hallie'll have you know despite the geographic specificity of her inflection but she has accompanied her father on many a sentimental journey home and been exposed to the front-porch patois of the natives, many of whom have been grist for her dad's theatrical mill. Each trip entails a stop at the local graveyard to assess the latest ravages of time. "He'll stand there and say, 'I'm the last.' There's not many of his generation left and certainly not many of the family he knew."
At 92, Horton Foote may well be the oldest living playwright still presenting new work on Broadway. Dividing the Estate, which Lincoln Center Theater and Primary Stages have brought to the Booth, is his eighth Main Stem entry and his first since his 1995 Pulitzer-winning The Young Man From Atlanta. It is also the first time he has presented his pride 'n' joy on Broadway, so he outfitted her in a scene-stealing role.
Written at the time it's set during the financial upheaval of 1987, when the savings and loan crisis caused land values and oil prices to plummet Dividing the Estate is a domestic comedy (now grimly topical) about a Texas clan mud-wrestling over the family money, real or imagined. Stella Gordon, a silver-haired matriarch (Elizabeth Ashley), and her square-shootin' grandson (Devon Abner), who manages the estate and is known to one and all as "Son," are belligerently besieged for early inheritances by the generation in between, all of them feeling the pinch of hard times: Mary Jo (Hallie), who moved from Little H (Harrison) to Big H (Houston) and lived too high on the hog; her fluttery stay-at-home sister, Lucille (Penny Fuller); and their boozing, gambling brother, Lewis (Gerald McRaney).
Round and round they go, like the Hubbards of The Little Foxes or the Pollitts of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof only funnier. Not only does Hallie not get in the first word, she enters the fray late 38 minutes into the play. But she makes up for lost time, digs in her heels and barely bothers to mask her machinations and her sell-sell-selfishness. Continued...
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