• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Home, at last

November 20, 2009 by Terry Teachout

This has been a wonderful week for New York-area theater, so busy that it took two columns in The Wall Street Journal for me to get it all in. Today I review two openings, the New York premieres of the first installment of Horton Foote’s The Orphans’ Home Cycle and Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play. The first is a masterpiece, the second a piece of…well, something else altogether. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Horton Foote, who died in March at the age of 92, had to wait until the very end of his life to win general recognition as one of America’s greatest playwrights. The tide was turned by a sterling pair of Off-Broadway revivals, the Signature Theatre Company’s 2005 production of “The Trip to Bountiful” and Primary Stages’ 2007 production of “Dividing the Estate,” that opened the eyes of a new generation of theatergoers to Foote’s low-keyed mastery. When “Dividing the Estate” transferred to Broadway the following year, he scored his first commercial success on the New York stage–just in time for him to revel in it. Would that Foote could have lived to attend the New York opening of the first part of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” co-produced by Signature and Connecticut’s Hartford Stage, where all three installments were seen earlier this year. It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren that you saw.
20cttheater_650.jpgCreated by Foote at the suggestion of Michael Wilson, the artistic director of Hartford Stage and the director of this production, “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” is a triptych carved out of a cycle of nine plays originally written between 1974 and 1997. It’s the story of a quarter-century in the life of a Texas family, and the family is Foote’s own, a flock of displaced people who are uprooted, scattered and damaged by the coming of modernity. The title alludes to Marianne Moore’s poem “In Distrust of Merits”: The world’s an orphans’ home. Shall/we never have peace without sorrow? At the center of the saga is Horace Robedaux, a fictionalized version of Foote’s real-life father (beautifully played as a child by Dylan Riley Snyder, as a teenager by Henry Hodges and as an adult by Bill Heck). Cast adrift by the death of his own alcoholic father and the remarriage of his mother to a resentful man who loathes his stepson, Horace becomes a stranger in a familiar land, searching for a peace that continually eludes him….
Not having seen the second or third parts, I can’t yet evaluate the total effect of the cycle as a whole, but “The Story of a Childhood” has the narrative sweep that you look for in major novels, coupled with the electric immediacy that only live theater can supply….
Sarah Ruhl writes retchingly coy plays that pretend to be transgressive–a sure-fire recipe for success of a sort. “In the Next Room or the vibrator play” (trendy capitalization and punctuation by Ms. Ruhl, not me) is an all-too-typical example of her method. It’s a fictionalized history play about a 19th-century American physician (Michael Cerveris) who discovers that “hysterical” women experience miraculous recoveries when he induces “paroxysms” by stimulating their nether regions with his brand-new invention, an electric vibrator….
“In the Next Room” is a sentimental wallow studded with sniggering jokes that too often appear to be made at the expense of Ms. Ruhl’s innocent characters, none of whom is believably Victorian in speech or carriage. The result is the theatrical equivalent of a jelly donut with vinegar-flavored frosting…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

Filed Under: main

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

November 2009
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  
« Oct   Dec »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man
  • Almanac: Gore Vidal on the will to power
  • Verbal virtuosity
  • Jump-starting an arts revival
  • Replay: Alfred Hitchcock talks to Dick Cavett

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in