Photograph by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Horton Foote at New York’s Booth Theatre, where his "Dividing the Estate" was being performed, Oct. 11, 2008.

Horton Foote: "I Stick With It"

* Theater * The playwright, 86, keeps very busy and has won a new
fan at SCR, where his ‘Getting Frankie Married’ world-premieres.

March 29, 2002

By MIKE BOEHM, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Horton Foote achieved his first great success in the theater by laying on the histrionics.

That
was some 70 years ago, when he was a schoolboy from Wharton, Texas,
competing in a statewide drama contest. The play, he recalls, was about
three college roommates. He was the one with the bad drug habit.

"He
needed a fix, and I remember [performing] this catastrophic breakdown
onstage," Foote recalled. "When it was all over, the judges called my
teacher over and said, ‘Is that boy afflicted, or is that acting?.’ She
said it was acting, so they gave me first prize."

Somewhere
along the line, Foote changed his tack. By his mid-20s he had concluded
that writing, not acting, was his true calling. And since 1940, when
his first play was produced, he has secured a niche as an admired,
Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist who eschews stage histrionics and
invites audiences to absorb the subtle, detailed ebb and flow of life
in Harrison, Texas, the fictional small town modeled on Wharton where
his stories unfold.

On March 14, Foote spent a chunk of his 86th
birthday at New York City’s Lincoln Center, where his play "The
Carpetbagger’s Children" was in rehearsals for its New York premiere
this week. After the opening, he was planning to take a day off, then
fly to Costa Mesa in time for tonight’s first preview performance of
another new play, "Getting Frankie Married-and Afterwards," at South
Coast Repertory.

"I love the theater, and I’m always there" when
a major production is gearing up, Foote said over the phone recently
from a New York hotel room. "I’m sure I’m a bother, but there I am. I
stick with it."

Foote is five months younger than his more
famous, and similarly still productive peer, Arthur Miller. But Foote
has a four-year head start on Miller when it comes to getting plays
produced: Miller’s debut didn’t come until 1944, with "The Man Who Had
All the Luck." (Miller’s next play, "Resurrection Blues," opens Aug. 9
at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapollis.)

Foote has written more
than 60 plays. He won the Pulitzer for his 1994 drama, "The Young Man
From Atlanta." He won Oscars for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s "To
Kill a Mockingbird" and his original screenplay for "Tender Mercies."
He won an Emmy for his TV adaptation of William Faulkner’s story "Old
Man." In 2000, President Clinton awarded him a National Medal of Arts.

And now, finally, he has stuck with it long enough to see one of his plays produced on a major Southern California stage.

Overlooked in Southland Until a New Fan Emerges

His
work has been done occasionally here in small theaters. But until South
Coast Repertory secured the world premiere of "Getting Frankie
Married," the area’s leading resident companies-including the Mark
Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre and Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, the
Globe Theatres and La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego County and the
Laguna Playhouse, Pasadena Playhouse and South Coast itself-had been
pitching a career shutout against Foote.

Martin Benson, the
South Coast artistic director and director of "Getting Frankie
Married," acknowledges having overlooked Foote until the playwright’s
agent sent the "Frankie" script about 18 months ago. Benson went for it
immediately. Now he is reading his way through the Foote oeuvre, with
an eye toward producing more of his scripts–"The Trip to Bountiful,"
which was made into a movie with Geraldine Page in 1985, is a leading
candidate.

"I’m a great admirer of his now," said Benson, who
spent time in Wharton with Foote, meeting some of the townsfolk and
soaking up the atmosphere in hopes of capturing some essence of
small-town Texas onstage in Orange County "Maybe one reason he’s not
produced as much as he should be is that sometimes his plays seem
simplistic on the page. You can think, ‘Oh, rural America’ and that
it’s oversimplified and a cliche. But when you get up to act them,
they’re incredibly rich, with enormous depths. That’s been my discovery
with this play."

Foote wrote "Getting Frankie Married" around
1990, the year in which the play is set. One reason it may not have
been produced until now is that it requires a cast of 12–a huge number
for a contemporary play. Its central figures are Fred Willis, a
wealthy, 43-year-old landowner, and Frankie Lewis, the girlfriend he
has been stringing along for more than 20 years. Frankie is a wife in
all but name and an object of small-town gossip. Fred makes a series of
choices-motivated, he thinks, by love and honor-that turn out horribly
for him.

Foote rates Fred as perhaps the saddest character he
has ever drawn. "That last moment is certainly very moving. to me.
There’s nobody there to comfort him, and he has to struggle through it
for himself."

Although Southern California has been a tough nut
for Foote to crack in terms of productions, it was, long ago, the
seedbed for his theater career. After winning schoolboy laurels for his
acting in Texas, he managed to get his reluctant parents" approval of
his plan to skip college and get more theatrical training. They
wouldn’t countenance his going to New York–"They thought it was a
wicked place"–so he headed West and enrolled in the Pasadena
Playhouse’s acting conservatory. Foote said s the event that shaped him
most in Pasadena–apart from having his Texas accent whitewashed in
elocution lessons–was the touring production of "Hedda Gabler" he
attended in Los Angeles on his 18th birthday with his visiting
grandmother. Eva Le Gallienne’s performance enraptured him, and he came
back to see "A Doll’s House" and "The Master Builder," the other plays
the noted actress was performing in repertory.

"It really rocked
me," Foote recalled. "I’d had this sense of ‘Maybe I’ll end up in the
movies.’ This made me go to New York to be a [stage] actor." In New
York, Foote began writing plays as well as acting in them. "Texas
Town," staged in 1941, won a rave from New York Times critic Brooks
Atkinson who loved Foote’s writing but panned his acting. Writing
became his focus. Foote said he is searching these days for his next
idea, making notes and hoping inspiration will take hold. "There’s
something I’ve been thinking about for 20 years, searching for a way to
do it," he said. He declines to elaborate because "I think it’s death
to talk about something when you’re working on it."