The Orphans' Home Cycle Part III

GRADE: B+



By Horton Foote, Directed by Michael Wilson. At The Signature Theatre through May 8th

Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle comes to a close, and while every reviewer concedes the journey is worth it, some feel that the third part is most definitely the weakest. Which isn't the same as saying it's bad-- the lowest grade in this set is a B- -- but just that the final trilogy of plays in the cycle lacks focus and seems edited to the point of choppiness. Not everyone feels this way of course, David Cote at Time Out, Jonathan Mandell at The Faster Times, Erik Haagensen at Backstage and Melissa Rose Bernardo are all ecstatic. To put it another way, there's a real split in this crop of reviews. Reviewers who use covering the third part as a way of opining on the whole cycle heap praise on the entire undertaking, while those that consider the third part on its own are left feeling respectful, but hardly over-the-moon.

Backstage A+
(Erik Haagensen) Now that the end of the cycle has been reached, I'm happy to say that what I hoped for after seeing Part One is true: Foote's final gift to the stage is glorious, an essential American masterwork.

The Faster Times A+
(Jonathan Mandell) The characters soldier on through their sorrows without much fuss, just as the playwright depicts their everyday struggles with an engaging modesty and familiarity. It is an approach that contrasts so heavily with the explosive, excessive, confrontational dramas to which we have become accustomed (or deadened) that “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” almost seems like the invention of a new art form. Having now seen all nine plays in three evenings over the last month – plays that will be presented in three programs in repertory at the Signature Theater Company through the end of March — I can say that I have found it the most rewarding theatrical experience of the season and probably one of the most memorable in my life.

Time Out New York A
(David Cote) [Foote has taken] nine plays and resculpted them into something elevated and elemental, like Greek tragedy. It’s not that the final part of his trilogy, The Story of Family, includes any cathartic spasms of matricide and revenge, even if Horace Robedaux (Bill Heck) has stored up a lifetime of resentment toward his mother. I mean the action exists in a kind of suspended reality—not bound by the laws of time and faintly ritualistic. So fine-tuned is the ensemble’s acting, and so precise is Michael Wilson’s direction, this temporal strangeness only heightens the complex pleasures of Foote’s melancholy masterpiece.

Entertainment Weekly A
(Melissa Rose Bernardo)After nine hours of The Orphans' Home Cycle, it seems ungrateful to want more: There are, after all, nine plays and three productions on display at Off Broadway's Signature Theatre; director Michael Wilson and his 22-member cast have done remarkable work, imbuing Foote's epic piece with a delicate intimacy. Even though you can always go back to visit — parts 1–3 rotate in repertory through March 28 — it's hard to leave Home.

New York Daily News A-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Superior acting, direction and design work — hallmarks of the first two segments of "The Orphans' Home Cycle" — are front and center in this final installment. But there are some gaps. "1918" suffers from being compressed to an hour, and having Hallie Foote, so singular in voice and manner, double as a different character is distracting. And the presence of Horton's long-absent mother, Corella (Annalee Jefferies), doesn't quite square with what's come before.

New Jersey Newsroom A-
(Michael Sommers) In editing these nine full-length plays to one-hour versions each, Foote — who died last March at the age of 92 — compressed time significantly to the point where occasionally the action seems oddly choppy. But for viewers who invest their affections in the characters, witnessing the engrossing arc of Horace's personal journey plus the sincere realism of the acting goes a long way to ease such bumps in the text. Truly giving an ensemble performance, some 20-some actors do beautifully by the many people of long-ago southeastern Texas. Maturing believably in sober looks and attitude, Bill Heck's deep-feeling Horace manfully shoulders his burdens. Maggie Lacey positively glows as ever-supportive Elizabeth. The one and only Hallie Foote (the playwright's daughter) not only nicely depicts mournful Mrs. Vaughn but in "Cousins" shines drolly as a nouveau-riche relation who reports her disappointment with Europe.

NY Post B+
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Closure at last! With a total running time now up to nine hours, Horton Foote's "The Orphans' Home Cycle" finally draws to an end with the opening of its third and last three-act installment, "The Story of a Family." It's been a long, steady ride since the first one opened in November, and reaching the destination brings a fulfilling sense of completion.

Associated Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) After already having spent six hours with the man, Horace has, by this third collection of one acts, become an old friend. He anchors Foote's intricately woven tapestry of life in fictional Harrison, Texas, during the first three decades of the 20th century.Part 3, which opened Tuesday at off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company, is called "The Story of a Family," and is directed — like Parts 1 and 2 — by Michael Wilson with stunning clarity. Its themes are pretty much summed up by one of the characters in the evening's second act: "A family is a remarkable thing, isn't it? You belong. And then you don't. It passes you by, unless you start a family of your own."

New York Times B
(Ben Brantley) The three short dramas that make up “The Story of a Family,” which opened on Tuesday night, are both the starkest and most sentimental of this lovingly painted life-and-times portrait, directed by Michael Wilson in a co-production of the Hartford Stage and the Signature Theater Company...That organic balance between things great and small is less assured in “The Story of a Family” than it is in the two earlier groupings, “The Story of a Childhood” and “The Story of a Marriage.” All the plays had to be trimmed — each to roughly an hour — to make the cycle’s presentation possible. And given the steady stream of momentous occurrences in this last section, the telescoping effect can start to feel surreal, with birth, death, disgrace, departure and reunion all happening within absurdly brief stage time. You wish that the poor characters (and sometimes the poor audience) were given at least a chance to catch their breath between deaths.

TalkinBroadway B
(Matthew Murray) So, sadly, does Part 3 as a whole. If “Cousins” fixes the thematic point of the epic, neither it nor its companion plays ultimately contribute as much, as deeply, as those in the preceding two evenings. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t see Part 3 if you’ve already devoted six hours to Parts 1 and 2 - you should. Nor is it to say that Part 3 isn’t basically satisfying - it is. But the payoff is not quite the equal of the investment, and if Parts 1 and 2 spanned the quality gamut from “amazing” to “otherworldly,” Part 3 must content itself with a solid, earthly, qualifier-free “good.”

TheaterMania B-
(Dan Bacalzo) The final installment of what has been a remarkable theatrical achievement -- combining nine of the late playwright's works into one three-part epic that follows the life of Horace Robedaux (Bill Heck), a character based on Foote's own father. However, this last trio, subtitled The Story of a Family, is unevenly presented and only partially fulfills the promise of the material.

North Jersey B-
(Robert Feldberg) After the extraordinarily affecting "Part 2," which followed Horace's courtship of Elizabeth Vaughn (Maggie Lacey) and their marriage, "Part 3" turns out something of a disappointment, although still worthwhile for followers of the story. (All three of the evenings are being presented in repertory, so if you missed the first two parts, you'll be able to catch up.)

Village Voice B-
(Michael Feingold) What significance Foote means us to draw from Horace's story isn't always clear. Taken as a whole, the trilogy shows a steady slippage of focus. Full of group comings and goings that, in Michael Wilson's production, often look mechanical, Part 3 seems awash in the reiterated family data and town gossip that, in earlier segments, function as a dramatic contrast to Horace's embittered silence. Even the climax, in which he finally explodes at his insufficiently caring mother, is overshadowed by a secondary character's having a similar but showier explosion. Still, the work has enough substance to support its three-evening length, especially with performers like Pat Bowie, Annalee Jefferies, Maggie Lacey, and Pamela Payton-Wright to articulate it.

BS A+ 14; TFT A+ 14; TONY A 13; EW A 13; NYDN A- 12; NJNR A- 12; NYP B+ 11; AP B+ 11; NYT B 10; TB B 10; TM B- 9; NJ B- 9; VV B- 9; TOTAL: 147/13= 11.31 (B+)

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The Orphans' Home Cycle (Part II)

GRADE: A



By Horton Foote. Directed by Michael Wilson. At the Signature Theater Through March 27th

Bigger really is better Off-Broadway this holiday season. With reviews ranging from an ecstatic A+ to a respectful B, the second installment of Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle has opened to universal acclaim for its staging and its 22-person cast, particularly lead Bill Heck and Horton Foote's daughter, Hallie. The sole complaint (which comes up in several reviews) is that, in trying to edit the nine plays in the cycle down to an hour each, the pieces feel a bit truncated and abrupt.

NY Daily News A+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) The real reason Foote's drama is so big and important is because it's so exquisitely realized — the writing, acting, direction and design. So far, it's a home run for its presenters, the Signature Theatre Company and Hartford Stage.

The Faster Times A+
(Jonathan Mandell) The three plays of “The Story of A Marriage” — “The Widow Claire,” “Courtship,” and “Valentine’s Day” — are in their plain underplayed way so engaging, so moving, that at several moments it can be hard to avoid the embarrassing spectacle of quietly crying in your seat at the Peter Norton Space of the Signature Theater Company. Beware of such a moment, for example, in the speech where the normally taciturn Horace finally opens up, saying lines like “I am no orphan, but I think of myself as an orphan, belonging to no one but you.”... Something extraordinary.

Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) The second part of The Orphans' Home Cycle, Horton Foote's family album of plays about a turn-of-the-century Texas family and its struggles with the coming of modernity, has just opened at Signature Theatre Company. It upholds the immeasurably bright promise of the first installment. Not since Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" has so self-evidently significant a large-scale theatrical endeavor come to New York.

TalkinBroadway A+
(Matthew Murray) “Intense” is not a word typically associated with the plays of Horton Foote. But when discussing the second chapter of the Signature Theatre Company’s production of The Orphans’ Home Cycle, none other will do. It’s not just that “The Story of a Marriage,” as it’s delightfully, deceptively titled, is riveting, though it is. Nor is it that it’s leaps and bounds better than the first part of the trilogy, which was already one of the finest evenings of theatre New York had seen in 2009, though against all odds it is. It’s that Foote has captured so many searing emotions and instances of raw-rubbing truth that this gone-in-a-blink three-hour outing isn’t at all about its ostensible subject, the ever-seeking Horace Robedaux (Bill Heck). It’s all about you.

North Jersey A
(Robert Feldberg) There were affecting moments in the first three plays, as young Horace moved around among relatives without complaint, but the works were uneven, and, since the leading character was essentially acted upon, somewhat lacking in drama....The plays are superbly acted by a large cast, and have been directed by Michael Wilson with uncommon sensitivity.

NYPost A
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Rarely has everyday life been so modestly inspiring as it is in Foote's hands. The worst part is that we have to wait another month to see how it all ends.

Backstage A
(Erik Haagensen) Horton Foote's epic nine-play cycle about early-20th-century life in the small fictional town of Harrison, Texas, continues on its winning way. The three plays making up Part Two follow Horace Robedaux into his early adulthood, marriage, and incipient fatherhood, and there's not a wasted moment in them. As with Part One, three hours fly by as this utterly engaging and deeply compelling work unfolds.

On Off Broadway A
(Matt Windman) The Signature Theatre's noteworthy production, which presents the nine plays over three evenings, features 22 actors playing over 70 roles. Directed with cinematic finesse by Michael Wilson, the epic effort displays the gentle playwright at his very best. When other playwrights abandoned traditional storytelling in the mid-20th century, Foote devoted his writing to detailed, complex characters from the viewpoint of his Texas hometown....The entire cast is superb, especially Bill Heck as the forlorn but resilient Horace. But it is the playwright's daughter Hallie Foote, often considered the foremost interpreter of his work, who truly stands out in a wide variety of roles.

NYTimes B+
(Ben Brantley) Directed by Michael Wilson with assured understatement, and acted by a consistently convincing and versatile repertory cast, these plays flow with a sense of everyday life accelerated, moving by us in a blur of dramatic happenings lodged in the fine grit of the ordinary. The stories swapped here include tales of madness, alcoholism, suicide and deaths in childbirth.

Associate Press B+
(Michael Kuchwara) Horace Robedaux continues his journey into adulthood in Part 2 of "The Orphans' Home Cycle," Horton Foote's masterful examination of one man's life in small-town Texas in the first decades of the 20th century.

Theatermania B+
(Dan Bacalzo) There are moments in the script, particularly in Valentine's Day, that teeter on the brink of sentimentality. But Foote wisely undercuts this with a dark sense of humor, as well as a lingering sadness that makes whatever joy the characters experience seem, at best, bittersweet. Foote also includes some odd non-sequiturs in his dialogue that relieves the tension in certain moments, and provides several laughs, as well.

New Jersey Newsroom B
(Michael Sommers) Having written the nine full-length dramas in this cycle at various times during his career, Foote had virtually completed adapting them into hour-long versions for this new three-part epic when he died last March at the age of 92. A lurking suspicion that Foote may have edited his work somewhat too sharply is confirmed by viewing this second group of plays. People abruptly go off to events and improbably return even faster. Gossipy tales are whittled to their essentials.

GRADES:NYDN A+ 14; TFT A+ 14; WSJ A+ 14; TB A+ 14; NYP A 13; NJ A 13; BS A 13; OOB A 13; NYT B+ 11; AP B+ 11; TM B+ 11; NJNR B 10; TOTAL: 151/12 =12.58 (A)

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The Orphans' Home Cycle (Part 1)

GRADE: A-

(photo by Gregory Constanzo)

By Horton Foote. Directed by Michael Wilson. Signature Theatre. Through Mar. 28.

In a bittersweet irony worthy of the playwright himself, Horton Foote is receiving possibly his warmest embrace less than a year after he died at 92, with the first installment (subtitled "The Story of a Childhood") in a nine-play epic of small-town Texas life. Most critics echo Ben Brantley's observation that Foote's plays, which individually can seem like well-turned miniatures, take on gratifying heft and scope when stacked together. Though a few critics knock the first play, Roots in a Parched Ground for being mostly expositional, and some others see the second play, Convicts, as an outlier (for better or worse), all but the Bergen Record's Robert Feldberg are thrilled with anticipation for the journey ahead, when Parts II and III open (Dec. 13 and Jan. 24, respectively). Most-used adjective for Michael Wilson's direction: cinematic.

Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren you saw...Nothing much happens in "The Story of a Childhood"...nor do the characters have anything especially memorable to say. In place of studied eloquence, Foote offers us a Chekhov-like poetry of place and atmosphere, as homespun as a hand-me-down quilt. Yet this group portrait of small-town life, like "The Trip to Bountiful" before it, is neither comfortably nostalgic nor tiresomely bitter. Instead Foote shows us the world as it really is, subtly heightened by lyricism but always true to experience..."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...Mr. Wilson, who also directed "Dividing the Estate," has staged "The Story of a Childhood" with supple, near-cinematic fluidity, moving from scene to scene so easily that you almost forget you're watching a play.

Backstage A+
(Erik Haagensen) By the time director Michael Wilson's bone-deep production of the first part of Horton Foote's "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is over, nearly three hours have passed in the blink of an eye. I wanted the second part to begin immediately...Foote based his work on the life of his father, which he learned of through numerous family stories told repeatedly to him in his youth. He certainly listened well: The writing is wise, deeply observant, and impressively detailed. Deceptively small-scaled and naturalistic, the work is really epic in scope, placing the lives of these modest people against the sweeping forces of social change and the vagaries of time. There is more genuine myth evoked in a single moment of Foote's simplicity than in all the self-consciously poetic strivings of the Public Theater's current "The Brother/Sister Plays." There's not a weak link in the 22-member company, which serves the writing beautifully under Wilson's piercingly clear-eyed direction...What we are being served here is nothing less than an American masterwork.

The New York Times A
(Ben Brantley) Promises to be the great adventure of this theater season...Directed with cinematic fluidity and novelistic detail by Michael Wilson, “The Story of a Childhood” leaves you as eager as a kid who has just started his first fat work of fiction by Charles Dickens, say, or Mark Twain, when putting down the book, even for an hour, feels like punishment...It’s a thrilling demonstration of an artist long regarded only as a miniaturist soaring into the realm of the epic...The exposition-heavy “Roots” is, on its own, the least interesting of the plays, but a necessary (and painless) initiation into the family trees that shade the cycle. “Convicts,” on the other hand, is a juicy slice of Lone Star gothic...The basis for a 1991 film starring Robert Duvall, “Convicts,” here acted by a uniformly excellent supporting cast, is the evening’s glorious and pathetic ghost story, in which people are doomed to haunt themselves...Anchored by geography and genealogy, Foote’s characters are nonetheless unmoored travelers in forever uncharted lands. That their creator has shaped them with such warm compassion and cold clarity makes us eager to accompany them on every step of an odyssey that is somehow as surprising as it is familiar.

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) An impressive introduction to Foote's three-part, nine-play marathon...Foote has a particular gift for time and place, expertly capturing the era and that area of southeast Texas where he grew up...While it may not seem as if there is an abundance of plot, Foote is quietly building a collection of finely etched characters. And director Michael Wilson has marshaled a fine cast to portray these people. There is an innate melancholy to Heck's performance, a sadness that suggests there will be enough material for several more evenings of drama...If Part 1 of "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is any indication, we are in for a remarkable journey.

Time Out NY A
(David Cote) Yes, these three one-act plays include leisurely strolls down memory lane, but there is so much life compressed here: greed, disease, murder, cruelty to children, the bitter legacy of slavery and a sad, ambivalent hero—Horace Robedaux, alienated observer of a family that abandoned him...As in most Foote plays, the terse, quietly suffering characters are caught between the past and the future, hoping to reinvent themselves but also ensnared by a dimly remembered past. Director Michael Wilson and his versatile, highly talented ensemble (including the radiant Hallie Foote, the late author’s daughter) wrestle their material into shape, delivering three hours of episodic narrative spanning 1902 to 1910 without a dull moment...Foote’s understated epic is an authentic American classic about the birth pangs of the 20th century. It’s told with humor, deep sadness and great writerly craft. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The Faster Times A
(Jonathan Mandell) On the evidence of the three plays of Part I, I am already hooked...These first three hour-long plays, presented together under the title “The Story of A Childhood,” offer a committed cast of 21 actors in a splendidly fluid production that promises to turn Foote’s character studies (most of which had been produced previously) into a theatrical epic that recalls such past stage marathons as the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s Life and Adventure of Nicholas Nickleby or Robert Shenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle–-all at a cost of just $20 per ticket.

Entertainment Weekly A-
(Melissa Rose Bernardo) There's much melancholy beauty to be found in The Story of a Childhood...No one is better equipped than director Michael Wilson to handle the delicate rhythms of this writer's work...The pace is appropriately, achingly languorous. Anyone not familiar with Foote's light-on-plot, heavy-on-character storytelling style — if it's important, it happens off stage, and we hear about it 10 different ways — might find themselves getting anxious. Foote's particular brand of poetry can seem old-fashioned, even simplistic. But with its tales of harsh times, social and economic change, Reconstruction, education, and industry in small-town America, The Story of a Childhood heralds the beginning of something extraordinary. And you'll be waiting with baited breath for Foote's next chapter.

Talkin' Broadway A-
(Matthew Murray) This could be the event of the season. But more than that, it could well become another grand theatrical epic, in line with O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra or Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, but based on places, people, and feelings that don’t draw their inspiration from Greek tragedy or 19th-century European politics, but instead from the very fabric of America...As Horace’s story unfolds, the depth and insight of Foote’s milieu - and its potential when spread across the better part of three decades - reveal and distinguish themselves. The problems of Horace and his family, though small in the grand scheme of things, read large for the reason similar trials in Foote plays so often do: they intimately treat the experiences and fears with which we all grapple...“The Story of a Childhood” can often seem more like a promise than a delivery, background information for the more probing visions of the past to come. The first and third plays are captivating because of their devotion to family drama, but the second is a rocky digression that - at least at this point - seems necessary more for thematic than plot reasons...But don’t let that deter you...If the rest of The Orphans’ Home Cycle lives up to this first installment, it will be a true joy discovering the answer over the next few months.

Edge Boston A-
(Jonathan Leaf) I’d be very surprised if a hundred years hence it isn’t more and more fondly recalled than the first production of Eugene O’Neill’s torpid and pretentious epic, Strange Interlude, for instance - or even than Tony Kushner’s Angels in America...The faults of Foote’s vastly broad but utterly intimate study of life in rural Texas in the first decades of the last century are many, and they are abundantly on display...The performances of the actors, working under Hartford Stage director Michael Wilson, also vary widely in quality. But the strengths of both presentation and of the plays are very considerable. Foote has the humanity and the knowledge of people that lie at the essence of the important artist, and the comparisons made between Foote and Chekhov are hardly unjustified...In bringing the cycle to the stage, both Signature and Hartford Stage, as the joint producers, deserve our praise. For the production is both handsome and immense...Is this great theater? It is at least very, very good.

New York Post B+
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Rarely has something so epic been so unassuming. A lot happens in Horton Foote's three-hour-long "The Story of a Childhood," set in the rough and tumble world of early 20th-century Texas. The tone never wavers from a certain humble plainness, even when scenes deal with jealousy and alcoholism or allude to tragic deaths...Few authors write pettiness as well as Foote does, and few actors play it as well as his own daughter Hallie, brilliant as always in relatively short parts. Granted, there are times when you wish the plays could be pricklier, messier. Doesn't anyone ever scream in this world? But then you realize that by not raising his voice, Foote gives his melancholy a subversive edge.

Bloomberg News B+
(John Simon) A magnificent cross-section of a great playwright’s career...Michael Wilson’s fluid staging helps to tie together three somewhat disparate acts. But what most justifies the three-hour duration, which includes two brief intermissions, is Foote’s uncanny ability to empathize with his characters, regardless of how marginal or unsympathetic they are.

Theatermania B+
(Dan Balcazo) An excellent start to this epic undertaking...The first piece on the bill, Roots in a Parched Ground, is the weakest, primarily because it is overladen with exposition...Things pick up considerably in the second play, Convicts, set on Christmas Eve, 1904. The teenage Horace has entered the workforce, clerking at a plantation store and occasionally watching over the African-American prison laborers who work the fields...The piece is also full of macabre humor and terrific supporting performances...The third play of the evening, Lily Dale, is set in Houston in 1910...The entire cast delivers nuanced performances, but the clear stand-out in this section is [Annalee] Jefferies...Wilson has directed the evening with a cinematic eye, aided by Jan Hartley's projections, the lush original music and sound design by John Gromada, and the sliding units from scenic designers Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber.

Village Voice B
(Michael Feingold) Remarkably bleak. Far from exploiting period nostalgia or sentimentality, Foote's account of Horace's childhood is an epic of negativity, in which expected kindness or decency constantly get withheld...In decades past, Foote's longer plays used to infuriate me: They seemed nothing but wall-to-wall recitation of family connections. His new distillation juxtaposes these thick blocks of chatter with the deadly silences of despair and isolation, making the family tree seem less a source of inheritors' pride than a set of mental handgrips to cling to against the void. Powerful as Foote's material is, it still contains static sections, particularly in the second half of "Convicts," where the expository motor seems to hum without moving anything forward; director Michael Wilson's cast sometimes adds to the hum by simply passing the data along rather than stamping it with any individual character. Many in the large cast do better than that, however, and Foote's legacy to his daughter, Hallie, now includes another of the showy, sharp-tongued roles she seizes with such vigor, as the skinflint plantation owner's nasty, drunken niece.

Bergen Record B
(Robert Feldberg) Anyone who's seen Foote's work knows that nothing terribly dramatic is said or done...The second play, "Convicts," the evening's weakest link, has 14-year-old Horace working at a plantation store in order to earn money for his father's headstone. It focuses, however, on the plantation's owner, Soll Gautier, a demented, violent, alcoholic old man who runs his spread with the aid of indentured convicts. Gautier, who takes a liking to Horace, is a nasty piece of work, and it's hard to figure out why he gets so much face time. Feeling and nuance return with "Lily Dale," as Horace, now 20, accepts his mother's invitation to visit her and Lily Dale in Houston for a week...You might anticipate that the succession of the three plays – or, at least, the first and third – would deepen our involvement with the earnest young hero. But that doesn't really happen. The main reason, I think, is that Horace is essentially an unchanging victim, a passive figure – it's hard to get a handle on his inner life — to whom bad things happen. The production has been nicely designed, and efficiently staged by Michael Wilson, but few of the performers – most of them playing multiple roles – give their characters much oomph.

Wall Street Journal A+ 14; Backstage A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; Associated Press A 13; Time Out NY A 13; Faster Times A 13; Entertainment Weekly A- 12; Talkin' Broadway A- 12; Edge Boston A- 12; NYPost B+ 11; BN B+ 11; Theatermania B+ 11; VV B 10; Bergen Record B 10; TOTAL: 169/14=12.07 (A-)

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Dividing the Estate

GRADE: B+

By Horton Foote. Dir. Michael Wilson. Booth Theatre. (CLOSED)

Though the tone of the praise is occasionally more reverent than revved-up, critics mostly hail Horton Foote's old-fashioned family comedy, transferred from last season's acclaimed Off-Broadway run at Primary Stages, for its sensitive humanism, the performances—particularly those of Elizabeth Ashley and Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter—and its uncanny relevance to the current economic crisis. NOTE: The Hartford Courant's review was not graded, as it contained no discernible signs of evaluation.

Wall Street Journal A+
(Terry Teachout) It's a bitingly macabre comedy about a family of Texans who've been sponging off the money of their mother (Elizabeth Ashley) for so long that they've forgotten how to live their own lives...The best show now playing on Broadway, give or take Gypsy. Not only is it at least as good a play as August: Osage County, but this production, directed by Michael Wilson, is a stunner, a gorgeous piece of ensemble theater in which nobody puts a foot wrong.

The New York Times A
(Ben Brantley) Safely distanced by footlights, someone like Mary Jo, one of three squabbling siblings in Horton Foote’s tart and delicious Dividing the Estate, is heaven to be with. As played with true comic genius by Hallie Foote, the covetous, calculating Mary Jo has absolutely no sense of humor. But it’s hard to think of anyone on a Broadway stage right now...who’s funnier...This production...has ripened into an ideally balanced ensemble piece, with acting that matches and magnifies Mr. Foote’s slyly and acutely observant writing. A year ago Dividing the Estate was good, but a tad shaky in tone. This latest incarnation reveals it to be one of the masterworks of the 92-year-old Mr. Foote.

New York Post A
(Frank Scheck) This deeply humanistic and funny play is old-fashioned in the best sense. Director Michael Wilson's assured production features a wonderful ensemble cast whose seamless work feels even more lived-in than it did earlier...With death intruding not once but twice, there's an undeniable Chekhovian air to the proceedings. But it's alleviated by the richly comic, Southern-flavored dialogue and Foote's obvious empathy for all of his characters, even when they're behaving badly.

Bloomberg News A
(John Simon) Foote has over many years shown his ability to conjure up Texas milieus with his plays and screenplays redolent of everyday tragicomedy...Dividing the Estate is easily as good as, if not better than, his best earlier work...Dividing the Estate will draw you into its drawing room and the shadows beyond with the theatrical equivalent of a page- turner, capturing your undivided attention as you hang on its teasing turmoil in guiltlessly glad complicity.

Newsday A
(Linda Winer) Old-fashioned but bracingly unsentimental...Foote - 92 and definitely still counting - keeps adding to his remarkable stack of more than 60 intricately naturalistic scripts. Highlights in this one include his actress-daughter Hallie Foote, who descends on her mama's big old house with skinny-lipped buzz saw desperation. "I want everything," she snaps. "What do you want?"

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) Horton Foote's hilariously perceptive take on what good old-fashioned greed does to one cash-strapped Texas family...And while you think you may be getting a laundry lists of incidents recited by the more senior members of the household, the playwright has something more on his mind...There is a generosity of spirit in Foote's handiwork. He embraces all his creations, even the most mean-spirited of them. They are part of the fabric of everyday life in a small Texas town where such things as family squabbles over money are regular occurrences. And in Dividing the Estate, Foote manages to make them highly theatrical.

Backstage A
(David Sheward) There are showy parts and subtle ones, all played with honesty and precision and directed by Michael Wilson with a perfect balance of verisimilitude and theatricality...The play will probably turn up on the schedules of many regional and community theatres thanks to its single set (charmingly realized here by Jeff Cowie) and myriad meaty roles. Actors should take a gander for future employment opportunities and to see one of our finest authors near the top of his form.

Theatermania A
(Barbara & Scott Siegel) This work is not the little, quiet, and delicate dissection of Southern life and the people who live it that we've come to expect from this celebrated playwright. Instead, it's a southern gothic comedy about family and avarice that is full of well-earned belly-laughs. Who knew Foote could be this funny?

NY Observer A
(John Heilpern) Foote disproves the generalization that the skills of successful playwrights are at their juiciest in youth. To the contrary, the signs are that Mr. Foote’s energy and talent are unflagging...Mr. Foote’s writing is characterized by an unmodish sense of compassion and emotional restraint, and his language is everyday...The big ensemble of Dividing the Estate is well directed by Michael Wilson, who captures the shifting mood and nuances of the play beautifully.

New Yorker A
Horton Foote’s play about a Texas clan squabbling over finances moves to Broadway, and just in time: money-minded audiences will be pleased to know that the estate tax can be funny...What makes the play so charmingly batty is its obsessive-compulsive focus. The characters argue incessantly about dividing the estate, and not even the intrusion of death can stop them. Shrewd and admirably restrained, the play (directed by Michael Wilson) is quietly potent in its suggestion that cash is thicker than blood.

Variety A-
(David Rooney) A tart Chekhovian elegy for a disappearing way of life and a gentle skewering of complacent privilege...The well-worn scenario is familiar from more than one chestnut of Southern drama. But the playwright's work, as always, is distinguished by the delicate brushstrokes of his characterizations, making seasoned stereotypes human and giving even the most venal of them some hint of redeeming vulnerability. Perhaps even more essential to the old-fashioned play's appeal is Foote's deep understanding of the personalities within a precisely defined subculture. There's an exquisite balance between insidiousness and charm in this vipers' nest, and between affectionate anecdote and malicious gossip in their chatter.

The Record A-
(Robert Feldberg) Unlike many of Foote's plays, which have an aura of sad frustration, Dividing the Estate is a lively comedy, small in scale but with a surprising number of big laughs...Under the deft direction of Michael Wilson, Dividing the Estate glides along at an easy, unforced pace, with flavorful performances all around...The evening's highlight, though, is Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter...Foote delivers a virtuoso comic performance that's worth the price of admission. Really.

The Daily News B+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Ham, anyone? It's on the dinner table and at center stage in Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, a lighthearted look at a fractious family facing financial straits and—Lord above!—each another...Under the deft direction of Michael Wilson, the actors are keener and the handsome production feels tighter...It's not as profound or ambitious as Broadway's other multigenerational melee, August: Osage County, but Foote's fine play does go down easy.

Time Out NY B+
(Adam Feldman) The eternally spry Horton Foote does a nimble Texas two-step in Dividing the Estate. Half the play is a leisurely, courtly, astutely observed portrait of cultural and generational change; the other half is a quick, lively comedy of manners and manors in decline...[Hallie] Foote—a specialist in her father’s work—pickpocketed the show Off Broadway as the tense and greedy Mary Jo, and now openly mugs it...But why complain? Foote is giving the comic performance of the season.

AM New York B+
(Matt Windman) In addition to its hearty laughs, Dividing the Estate is in fact a brilliant dissection of greedy family politics and the out-of-control economics that have caused our country’s current recession...Husky-voiced Elizabeth Ashley is stunning as she physically transforms herself into a female version of Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...Michael Wilson’s production well-cast production displays pitch-perfect comic timing and nuanced characterization.

Nytheatre.com B+
(Martin Denton) In some ways, [Foote has] written the timeliest comedy possible, though stylistically it feels like a vestige of a long-ago age, the one Stella and Doug grew up in, when ladies always wore hats and gloves and one lifted one's spirits with a good old-fashioned hymn like "Rock of Ages"...Michael Wilson's staging feels a bit less urgent than it did last year; how much of this, I wondered, is due to the larger distances the actors now must traverse on the Booth Theatre stage? Foote has cut his play some since last year, too, excising at least one exchange that I enjoyed so well that I quoted it in my review.

Village Voice B
(Michael Feingold) A reassuringly solid piece of theatrical furniture offering both regional style and moderate comic flair. Foote's tragicomic tale of a land-poor Texas family's fiscal woes now looks prophetic as well as quaintly sturdy...As played under Michael Wilson's direction, everything onstage seems natural, especially Penny Fuller and Hallie Foote as the two bickering sisters. Only Elizabeth Ashley's cane-thumping matriarch seems as exaggerated on Broadway as it did in the show's Off-Broadway unveiling last season.

Philadelphia Inquirer B
(Howard Shapiro) So much family history runs through Horton Foote's comedy Dividing the Estate, so much who-died-how and who-dissed-whom, that it threatens to suffocate the plot...Given the opportunities for zingers, the play itself could be more amusing. Still, its character development gives Dividing the Estate the hook to hold us through an evening that examines tax dodges and falling land sales and, more to the point, the greed that sets a generation of beneficiaries apart from its forebears. The play uneasily straddles the divide between comedy and caustic comment, on Jeff Cowie's detailed and elegant multi-room estate set. What balance it has comes from a 13-member cast that gives the play a starkly realistic feel.

Talkin' Broadway B
(Matthew Murray) When Primary Stages presented the show in the fall of 2007 with largely the same cast, it made a virtue of compactness...But rather than becoming more powerful and hilariously tragic in its transfer, gaining strength and topical relevance from the imploding stock market and the catastrophic housing crisis too reminiscent of the Gordons' Texas turmoil of 20 years ago, Dividing the Estate has grown colder and more distant...Many of the performances that were impeccably cut jewels Off-Broadway have had facets cracked by the now-necessary shouting and by the wear and tear of time.

USA Today C+
(Elysa Gardner) The folks we meet in Estate...can be immensely irritating, but they're not, well, bad people—or, truth be told, terribly interesting ones. That is the conundrum facing Michael Wilson, the director of this Lincoln Center Theater production, and his cast. If Estate's genial spirit is key to its charm, its lack of bite poses a considerable challenge...Wilson culls fine, unfussy performances from the company...Though these actors haven't the ingredients to cook up a truly meaty evening of theater, their resourcefulness—and Foote's grace—provide a mild kick.


The Journal News C-
(Jacques Le Sourd) Basically, a family sits around the dinner table, and its members claw at each other verbally for a couple of hours...You'll probably spend at least the first third of the play figuring out all the familial relationships in a large cast. These are not the fun Southerners of Tennessee Williams, who drink a lot. These people are abstemious, which makes them considerably more boring than other species of characters.

New York D+
(Stephanie Zacharek) The characters speak urgently and repeatedly about the need to “divaaahd the estate”—it takes them a while to get the phrase out, although not quite as long as it takes to actually divide the estate. The idea is that we’ll laugh at the family’s eccentricities and foibles, even as we sense their suffering...The whole enterprise has the feeling of a worn-out rug that’s been hung up for beating too many times. Dividing the Estate is harmless fun, which is good news only for those who fear being harmed by fun.

Wall Street Journal A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; New York Post A 13; Bloomberg News A 13; Associated Press A 13; Backstage A 13; ny Observer A 13; Theatermania A 13; New Yorker A 13; Variety A- 12; The Record A- 12; The Daily News B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; AM New York B+ 11; Nytheatre.com B+ 11; Village Voice B 10; Philadelphia Inquirer B 10; Talkin' Broadway B 10; USA Today C+ 8; Journal News C- 6; New York D+ 5; TOTAL: 248 / 22 = 11.27 (B+)

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