One of America’s greatest playwrights has died at the age of ninety-two, mere months after scoring his first full-fledged Broadway success. Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate transferred to Broadway last November, having previously received rave reviews when it first opened off Broadway in 2007. I wrote about it with the utmost enthusiasm on both occasions, and am greatly pleased to report that Connecticut’s Hartford Stage will be remounting that same production in May.
Three years ago I reviewed the Signature Theatre Company’s exquisite revival of Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. This is part of what I wrote about it for The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Foote’s great gift is his ability to drain the sentimentality out of potentially mawkish situations (the way he did in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Tender Mercies). The Trip to Bountiful could easily have degenerated into heart-tugging manipulation, but it never does. The tears it evokes–and I heard quite a lot of crying from the audience at the end of last Sunday night’s performance–are earned, not jerked….
I was sitting directly in front of Foote at that performance, and when it was over I wanted to tell him what it had meant to me. Alas, I was one of the many members of the audience who’d been moved to tears, and I was too choked up to say anything. Now I very much wish I had.
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The New York Times obituary is here.
This is the trailer for the 1985 film version of The Trip to Bountiful: