RIP - Horton Foote, Texas Playwright and Screenwriter

The past few months have been spent trying to get some order and routine into my new life as a bookseller in South Padre Island, TX, and as such I have not been keeping up with the world around me, so this may be old news to many of you.

From AP News:

Playwright and screenwriter Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in "The Trip to Bountiful," "Tender Mercies" and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," died Wednesday, March 4, in Connecticut. He was 92.

Foote left the cotton fields of his native Wharton, Texas, as a teenager, dreaming of becoming an actor. But realizing his gifts as a storyteller, he embarked on a writing career that spanned more than half a century and earned him two Academy Awards ("To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Tender Mercies") and a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for "The Young Man From Atlanta

The stories and lives of the people Foote loved in Texas became the bedrock for many of his plays, with the fictional Harrison, Texas, standing in for Wharton.

Dividing his time mostly between Texas and New York, he kept the Wharton home in which he had grown up and did much of his writing there. "I picked a difficult subject, a little lost Texas town no one's heard of or cares about," Foote told The New York Times in 1995. "But I'm at the mercy of what I write. The subject matter has taken me over."Never one for urbane and trendy topics, Foote instead focused on ordinary people and how their nostalgic recollections would mislead them.

For more information on Horton Foote see my post dated February 23 or click here for a short slide show.

Interview with Horton Foote

After attending the El Paseo Arts production of The Trip to Bountiful by Horton Foote, I decided to do some more research on the playwright. I wasn't aware that he had written the screenplay for works by Faulkner and Steinbeck, as well as To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an Academy Award.

In his 90's, he has a new play on Broadway and was interviewed on XM radio for The American Theatre Wing - Downstage Center, in September, 2007.

The interview is available here and can be heard on-line or downloaded as a MP3 file.


American Theatre Wing - Downstage Center - Horton Foote

A Trip to Bountiful

I went to tonight's sold out performance of A Trip to Bountiful . JoAnn and her cast should feel very satisfied with the community support for this production.

It was my first visit to the Port Isabel Yacht Club. I found myself wondering how much of the current furnishings etc., are original to the building. Another item to put on my list of regional things to learn more about. Emerging from the building and becoming enveloped in the mist and fog, it was easy to imagine what a history this place must have had. The Yacht Club was constructed in 1927 when Port Isabel was just beginning incorporation. Al Capone and Amelia Earhart were early guests. If only walls could speak.

By eliminating the need for a large stage area and elaborate set, the reading theater concept worked nicely for a small "home-grown" dramatization. Director JoAnn Evans describes this theater style in the plays program:

Reader's Theater is "theatre of the imagination. It is a medium in which two or more oral interpreters through their oral reading cause an audience to experience literature.

Readers Theater differs from the conventional play in various ways. There is no attempt made to create the sense of reality on stage. A narrative voice guides us through the story. There is no set, little movement, and the actors use what is called an offstage focus. The performers do not look at each other on stage as they would in life, but visualize their characters toward the audience in front of them. They can leave the scene simply by turning away and looking down at their script. The performers create images using their voices and physical expressions, and these images are formed not on stage but in the minds of the audience and the readers themselves--that's where the action takes place. Therefore, the audience is as much involved in the performance as the readers are.

Griff is a loyal fan of old time radio and when I read the above description I was reminded of the program "Theater of the Mind". These broadcasts, the TV of the past, engaged the listener in much the same way as what JoAnn describes.