Review - Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote

(I'm currently in Olympic radio silence, so I thought I'd try to distract myself by putting this review together.  More on the Olympics later...)  As soon as I saw the press release from Primary Stages that they were doing three short plays by Horton Foote, I bought a ticket.  I adore plays by Horton Foote.  I just love the gentle truth of the world he creates.  I always feel as if I know these characters and I so enjoy spending time with them.  I fully grasp that not everyone feels that way.  In fact, everyone in the audience last night didn't feel that way.  There will be more about them in a bit.  :)

Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote consists of three short plays, one written in the 50s and the others in the 80s.  The first act, Blind Date, I think was the perfect curtain-raiser.  It's a charming character piece, about a former beauty queen trying to prepare her borderline antisocial niece for a date.  Hallie Foote was spectacular as the aunt.  I swear, she can tell you more about a character's whole life in one step across the room than many actors can tell you in a whole play.  Devon Abner struck just the right note of indulgent affection as her husband, Andrea Lynn Green was a riot as the niece - completely blunt and off-putting, yet real and genuine and charmingly awkward.  And Evan Jonigkeit was terrific as the suitor, brash yet shy, and totally oblivious.  I could've spent a lot more time with these people - watching them play games reminded me of playing charades with my family when I was last home.  The Horton Foote world is just like being home to me.

The second act, The One-Armed Man, was an abrupt change in tone, though these characters are still totally familiar without being stereotypes.  I feel as if I've seen this play before, but I can't remember where.  Anyway, the piece opens with a self-satisfied employer condescending to his long-time employee, giving you an instantaneous view of this grandstanding hypocrite.  Then, when a former employee enters, now disabled because of an accident onsite, the tension rachets WAY up.  You just sit there, knowing and then not knowing what's going to happen.  You start to hold your breath at the power of the storytelling.  And your heart breaks at what people can be driven to.  Jeremy Bobb was terrific as the employer and Alexander Cendese (who is completely unknown to me) was so affecting as Ned, the now one-armed employee.  His pleas to get his arm back just wrecked me - they could have been melodramatic and odd, but he made them so natural and honest.

The third act was The Midnight Caller.  This one was maybe the least successfully directed of the three, but I realize it was probably hard to get the overlapping scenes quite right with the one setpiece.  But I also feel like the director let one of the actors down here.  The Midnight Caller is set in a boarding house in the 50s, where two single career gals have differing reactions to the arrival of two new boarders - a single man and a gal with a certain reputation around town.  How their entry into the house turns lives upside down is beautifully constructed by Foote.  You just get layer after layer after layer of hopeful humanity, tinged with sadness and regret.  It's really lovely, especially Jayne Howdyshell as the lonely schoolteacher who also lives in the boarding house.  Her speeches are spectacularly written and delivered, and the way her age just falls off her when she flirts with the new gentleman boarder is magical.  Alexander Cendese, who is worlds different in this piece, is again fantastic as the heartsick former suitor of the new female boarder who comes to cry for her every night at midnight.  I was crying during his brief scene with his love - he was quite heartbreaking.  The gal, on the other hand, was the one weak link for me.  I was thinking while watching her that perhaps this was her first Horton Foote play.  His dialogue is so natural, yet so specific, that you have to get all the cadences right to really make it soar.  She wasn't getting the cadences right, at all.  But I looked at her bio this morning, and she's been in several Foote pieces before.  So I'm going to assume that she had an off night, or that she's been struggling and the director couldn't help her.  But she didn't work for me at all.  I can think of several actresses of my acquaintance who would've gotten more out of the role.  But...that's me.  I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.  For once.  ;)

So, as you can tell, I again was enchanted by the world of Horton Foote.  The rest of the audience?  Not so much.  The guy behind me was asleep and snoring within the first few minutes.  His snoring was so loud that people way in front of us were turning around to look at him.  The gal down the row from me seemed to be more interested in unwrapping her candies throughout the plays instead of paying attention (and why she couldn't unwrap them in a more timely fashion is a mystery to me).  My favorite couple, though, were the Mickey Rooney lookalike with his much-younger-and-taller (yet still probably old enough to know better) gal pal, dressed in an outfit at least twenty years too young for her.  They made out, and I mean MADE OUT, pretty much through the entire pre-show (I've mentioned I like to get to the theater early, yes?) and then through much of the show as well.  More power to them, but hello.  Get a room.  Very distracting.  Good thing my powers of Foote-concentration are high indeed.  Thumbs up on the show (but not on the audience).  You definitely should go to 59 East 59 to see these plays.

**Olympics update:  my god, I've been enjoying these Olympics.  I love checking out sports that I normally don't get to see, like dressage, archery, cycling, fencing and diving.  I have a crush on the entire Senegalese men's soccer team and the Italian volleyball team.  And I'm totally in love with being able to stream events online, LIVE.  It hasn't stopped my primetime viewing at all!  The swimming has been so exciting, the gymnastics has been edge-of-your-seat thrilling, and the tennis has been exhausting.  EXHAUSTING.  Thank you to Bravo for showing almost the entire tennis event - Pat O'Brien has been a name-mangling bonehead hosting the broadcast, but Jon Wertheim from Sports Illustrated is great.  I just suffered through Roger's semifinal match as I've never suffered before - I want him to win a singles gold medal SO BADLY!  I'm tearing up now as I think about it.  And, finally, in his fourth Olympics, he'll play for the gold medal.  He'll at least come away with silver, which will be wonderful and his first singles medal, but I think the story can only end with gold.  Unless he's playing Murray in the final.  Then the story skews.  We'll see if I survive Sunday's final... 

**five years ago, I caught my first play by Sarah Ruhl, Eurydice, and I can still see that magical rainstorm inside the elevator; four years ago, I enjoyed A.R. Gurney's Buffalo Gal; and last year brought Charles Busch's Olive and the Bitter Herbs, which I still would like to see again...**