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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Dividing the Estate — Setting Foote on Broadway
By Harry Haun
21 Nov 2008
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Elizabeth Ashley, Gerald McRaney, Penny Fuller, Arthur French, Hallie Foote, Devon Abner, Maggie Lacey, Jenny Dare Paulin, Keiana Richard, James DeMarse, Virginia Kull, Nicole Lowrance and Pat Bowie
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Cane in hand, moving gingerly, Broadway's Oldest Living Playwright — a fragile but hearty Horton Foote, 92 — joined his dozen actors on stage at the Booth Nov. 20 for their final bows and lapped up some limelight himself for his Dividing the Estate.
To catch this historic moment, Lincoln Center Theater (which co-produced the play with Primary Stages, where it was unveiled last year) threw caution to the wind and, for the first time, permitted paparazzi to photograph the curtain call. It was the first time Foote had taken a bow on Broadway, he admitted later, since his days as an actor eons ago. It felt good, he said. "I enjoyed the play a lot tonight. It's a wonderful company, and the direction [by Foote-o-phile Michael Wilson] was just superb."
The softly rolling voice making the opening announcements at the start of the show (cellphones, et cetera) is Foote's "actor voice," rid of its regionalism early on through vigorous vocal training. The voice he has presented to the world as a playwright couldn't be more Lone Star specific, full of countrified colloquialisms and dropped g's favored by the dear hearts and gentle people of Foote's own Wharton, TX (here renamed "Harrison, TX," to keep the knowing and the back-fence gossips at bay).
Truth to tell, they're not very dear and hardly very gentle in Dividing the Estate, although they like to pretend they are even when they are saying or doing the most dastardly things. Foote has some perverse fun kicking this barely veiled Texas hypocrisy around the stage and, in the process, created a marvelously amusing monster for his daughter, Hallie Foote, to tear into in an impressive Broadway bow.
As the title promises, the play is a free-for-all fallout over inheritances. Three sets of siblings have descended on the old homestead with knives sharpened and drawn to carve up the just desserts — all of them smarting from the Savings and Loan crash of 1987 (when the play was written) — a foreshadowing speed-bump of things to come.
Hallie is the youngest and most ferociously focused of the greedy trio, Mary Jo, who has been living too high on the hog too long in Houston with her out-of-work husband (James DeMarse) and their two material-girl teenagers (Jenny Dare Paulin and Nicole Lowrance). The other corners in this brawl-in-the-family triangle are filled by Lewis, a loser with boozing and blackmailing problems (Gerald McRaney, brilliantly tipping an anguished interior life without ever directly addressing the subject) and Lucille (Penny Fuller), a reliable mainstay of the house whose main concern is the pulverizing that her son, "Son" (Devon Abner), will get from all sides and all comers because he has the misfortune of being the estate executor.
The primary obstacle of all this financial flailing about by the second-generation is the unmovable object sitting on the family wealth, their mother Stella (Elizabeth Ashley), who opposes any dismantling of the estate to her almost dying breath.
This domestic donnybrook lasts two rounds — or acts, with two scenes each. On opening night, intermission fell at 8:01, and smokers who braved the bracing (!) night air witnessed a long-standing tradition of The Great White Way — the dimming of the lights in memory of one of theatre's most ardent admirers, critic Clive Barnes.
After the show, first-nighters adjourned to the fifth floor of the Marriott Marquis with its acres and acres of party space and Southern cuisine. Crossing 45th, it was easy to see the Hatfields and the McCoys had moved to Broadway, only their respective warfare was confined to their own familial navels: the Booth's money-grubbing Gordons of Texas vs. the Music Box's dazzlingly dysfunctional Westons of Oklahoma.
Estelle Parsons, a frequent Foote notable (The Last of the Thorntons, The Day Emily Married), currently rules the unruly Weston roost in Tracy Letts' Tony-winning August: Osage County, and, had it not been her 81st birthday, she might have showed.
At one point of the after-party, a relieved Jamie de Roy turned to cabaret director Barry Kleinbort and observed the truism: "It's easier to party if you really like the play."
The consensus was that the play had conspicuously improved across the board(s) in this transfer — better performances, better set, even better hair (courtesy of the gifted wig designer Paul Huntley, who crowned Ashley, Fuller and their maid played by Pat Bowie with character-evoking 'dos.) And the Booth was a boon to the actors.
"Thank God, we've got places like Primary Stages that put these plays on to begin with and get them the notice they do, but then you move it to a house like the Booth, and you have that luxury of space," said McRaney. "It looks like a real old Southern home, and the actors then have that space to build, and that makes it a lot easier. Psychologically, it's easier to fall into characters when you occupy the real space."
Put another way by the production stage manager, Roy Harris: "Now you can see what all the fighting was about. Jeff Cowie built the original set for the tiny stage at Primary Stages, and he was thrilled to death about what he could do at the Booth."
But it was more than physical space, in the view of director Wilson: "What I think is exciting is that the ideas of Horton's play have been able to expand to the size of the Booth stage, and now his ideas about how we live as Americans and how we've indulged ourselves and how we have not lived frugally and responsibly are just bigger than they've ever been. I think the play was allowed to expand and the ideas and feelings and emotions just got bigger in that space — but no less true." Continued...
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