The Roads to Home

What terrific work we see on stage in Primary Stage’s production of Horton Foote’s The Road to Home, presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre!
The play is a comprised of three scenes centering on three Houston matrons. The first two scenes are set in 1924. In the first, A Nightingale, we meet Mabel, Vonnie and Annie in Mabel’s kitchen. Early in the play is a long speech in which Mabel describes Annie to Vonnie. We need to pay rapt attention to it, and Hallie Foote, as Mabel, is remarkable in her delivery, as she is throughout the play. Annie enters to visit, and we see that she is indeed as emotionally fragile as she’s been described. The second scene, The Dearest of Friends, takes place six months later and focuses on Vonnie’s marital problems.
In the third scene, set four years later, Spring Dance, we find Annie committed to a very nice state psychiatric hospital in Austin. Mabel and Vonnie do not appear and we meet instead some male patients.
The entire cast is superb as well. As Vonnie, Harriet Harris shows us many dimensions of a long-suffering woman. When she remembers something suddenly (she remembers a movie she saw), she seems genuinely surprised at her own thoughts. As the benighted Annie, Rebecca Brooksher is graceful and vulnerable without falling into a stereotype.
Michael Wilson’s direction is meticulous, subtle, masterful. The train whistles and the church bells are unobtrusive. His great accomplishment is to infuse the play with humor without trivializing the lives of these women. This is graceful, delicate naturalism.
Jeff Cowie’s sets are marvelous, indicating period and suggesting space. David C. Woolard’s costumes are great, from the ordinary dresses of the kitchen to Annie’s lovely dress at the institution’s dance.
Through all the dramatic elements, we find ourselves immersed in the setting and period. The character’s dialect is unmistakable American, with a lilting melody, using “see-gar” for “cigar” and “pick-chuhs” for “pictures”.
This isn’t the exoticized American South of Tennessee Williams, with its dueling archetypes. This South is the middle class milieu of ordinary people, and Foote makes the ordinary important. His characters are universal through their specificity.
The company, of course, has taken its tone from Foote’s script. The playwright presents the entire culture these women live in. Mabel is nearly obsessive about the details of Annie’s life. In her first scene speech and throughout the play Foote paints a complete picture of this Texas society. The fictional town of Harrison, Texas, is prominent in the characters’ stories, which Foote has based on his home town of Wharton.
But the script poses a challenge. There’s nearly no dramatic action in these scenes; situation is dominant, not plot. What action there is takes place off stage between scenes and the story is discontinuous. This is not the mechanism we’re accustomed to in receiving theater. It’s the great accomplishment of this company to keep us absorbed through emotionally grounded, fluid acting and sensitive direction.
We meet these ladies’ husbands in the first two scenes, and Mr. Wilson has cast the same actors as Annie’s fellow patients in the psychiatric hospital, in the third. This is an odd choice for a play that is so concerned with the larger society, and we’d prefer to see new faces. But Primary Stage’s Roads to Home is a great success.  
Steve Capra
November 2016

Popular posts from this blog

Anouilh's Antigone

There is a moment in Fusion Theatre’s production of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (at Theatre Row’s Studio Theatre) when Creon says to Antigone “Don’t annihilate me with those eyes.” And indeed, Antigone’s unrelenting stare does seem to be annihilating him, as it’s been annihilating everyone. As Antigone, Eilin O’Dea motivates Creon’s line so well that it seems Anouilh has written it in response to the actress. Anouilh’s play, as this production makes clear, is an important drama. Anouilh reworked Sophocles’ play keeping the ancient Greek names and keeping the action in Thebes. The characters, however, mention tobacco, blood tests, film and cars. The dissonance reminds us that Anouilh’s message of courage and moral responsibility is ageless. Anouilh has created a raisonneur in a character called simply The Chorus. Tragedy, he tells us, “has nothing to do with melodrama”. “In tragedy, argument is gratuitous,” he says, but this is a very strange line; Antigone and Creon will soo
Read more

C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert

C.S. Lewis lived between 1898 and 1963. He’s best known for his works of fiction such as The Screwtape Letters and The Chronicles of Narnia , although his non-fiction work is arguably more important. He ranks among the foremost 20 th -century Christian apologists and theologians. Max McLean has written a terrific solo show in which he presents Lewis in his study at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1950, C.S. Lewis on Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert . Mr. MacLean is the show’s actor, and he’s co-directed it with Ken Denison. The script details Lewis’ conversion from atheism to Christianity, delineating the transformation in discrete steps. Lewis begins with his childhood in Belfast: “Mother’s death produced in me a deeply engrained pessimism,” he tells us. And “At 13 I ceased to be a Christian. At that age one scarcely notices.” He was confirmed in The Church of Ireland “in total disbelief.” The script presents us with the structure of Lewis’ life – his time at Oxford, his enli
Read more

A Blanket of Dust

Image
Photo by Sharon Kinsella In Richard Squires’ play A Blanket of Dust, presented at The Flea Theater by Delphi Film in association with Alfonso Ramos and Eve Pomerance, a woman, Diane, looses her husband in the 9-11 disaster. She’s convinced that the government is responsible for the catastrophe, and campaigns to uncover the conspiracy. She’s a Senator’s daughter, so the issue becomes a family affair. Years later, she becomes involved with Andrew, a book store owner active in the dissident movement. Andrew is also at odds with his parents on political issues (his father is in government but it’s not clear what his position is.) In frustration, Andrew commits suicide - he sets fire to himself - in protest. This is all pretty grim, but, well, it’s a grim world, and it’s good to see issue- committed theater.   Mr. Squires’ keeps his script as lean as the WTC towers. The characters have no identity aside from their attitudes toward the issue, aside from the sketchy romance. Ther
Read more