Dallas Arts Organizations to Unite for 2011 Horton Foote Festival

By Adam Hetrick
April 2, 2010

The Dallas Theater Center will align with local arts organizations to present a citywide celebration of the work of late Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote in 2011.

The two-month celebration will launch on the anniversary of Foote's birthday, March 14, 2011, and run through May 1. Complete details of the festival will be revealed as each participating theatre announces its respective seasons.

Scheduled to participate are the Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, Circle Theater, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, Dallas Film Society, Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts & Letters Live, Kitchen Dog Theater, Stage West, Southern Methodist University DeGolyer Library, Theatre Three, Uptown Players, WaterTower Theater, WingSpan Theatre Company and 1:30 Productions.

Foote, a Texas native, is currently represented Off-Broadway with the Signature Theatre production of his epic, three-part Texas-set work The Orphans' Home Cycle. The playwright died in March 2009 while working on the plays that premiered at Hartford Stage last September.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote's plays also include Dividing the Estate (2009 Tony nomination for Best Play), The Carpetbagger's Children, The Trip to Bountiful, The Traveling Lady, The Chase, The Last of the Thorntons and Talking Pictures, among others. He is an Academy Award winner for the screenplays "Tender Mercies" and "To Kill a Mockingbird." The 92-year-old Foote had been in Hartford, CT, where he was putting the finishing touches on Orphans' Home Cycle, when he died March 2009.

Visit FooteFestival.