Stage:

...I found the casts of both plays well able to embody his vision, with only one exception...

...But it is Hallie Foote, as Myra in Pictures and Laura Lee in Seasons, who most profoundly actualizes her father's words...

...Since his father cannot scare up a Spanish Baptist congregation in Harrison, both father and son will have to return to Mexico...

...A community infused with warmth and open to the "other," but not one without problems-some of them serious...

...Make plans to go, and don't dawdle...

...STAGE TWO FOOTES FORWARD HORTON & HALLIE: SIGNATURE EVENTS The Signature Theatre Company, which functions very far Off-Broadway in the very small Kampo Cultural Center, nonetheless thinks big, having devoted each of its first four seasons to the work of a single major playwright...

...Laura Lee, by then dead, has a sad measure of revenge, for her mother is compelled to acknowledge that her daughter could barely stand to be near her...

...A word about the productions: For Foote, ensemble is all, and the Kampo's small stage and limited seating make it a fine place in which to experience his work...

...So perfect is her "down home" elegance in establishing his ambience and revealing his meaning that she is as much his collaborator as she is his star...

...The first two of the four plays that will constitute Foote's Signature season offer insight into both our success and the obstacles we impose upon ourselves, the false lights we follow in seeking that success...

...To single out far too few, in Talking Pictures Alice McLean as Mrs...

...Elizabeth Stearns as Delia, Thurman's wife, was far too strident even for a shrew in Harrison...

...It would include that wife, Gladys, and Myra's ex-husband, Gerard, were either of them capable of being part of a community...

...Night Seasons, on stage from November 4 through December 4, 1994, has as its moral center Josie Weems...

...But the saddest victim of Josie's egotism is her daughter, Laura Lee, who wants a home...

...Myra is about to lose her job because talking pictures mean a pianist will be de trop, and her teen-aged son wants to live with his father's new family in a grand house in Houston with a swimming pool...

...She cannot save the suicide, and she dies as she is about to write the check that would counter her mother's stinginess to the family's life-long housekeeper, underpaid grossly even on Harrison's not overly bountiful terms...

...It reaches out to Gladys's hapless lover, Ashenback, pronounced with such hard and twangy "a's" that the audience is in no danger of thinking too much about Thomas Mann or Venice...

...It is her motherliness which not only leads her to work for distant lepers, even in tandem with a Presbyterian, but far more to the point, it is her motherliness that makes her home the center of a community, a community that includes her tenant, Myra, a "grass widow" who supports herself and her son by playing the piano for the silent films at the local picture show...

...Though what is generous in her never dies, its richest gestures come too late...

...Unlike the wholly realistic Talking Pictures, Night Seasons takes place on Josie's ninety-third birthday, and the past is revealed through flashbacks, some of which-particularly scenes which are clearly images in Josie's memory-involve the characters' younger selves, shown from behind a scrim, singing the old-fashioned songs that should betoken community...

...The work's moral center is Mrs...

...MARIAN BURKHART Marian Burkhart's most recent article in Commonweal was "In the Paraclete I Trust," May 6, 1994...

...Last season's honoree was Edward Albee, and this season's is Horton Foote, America's softest-spoken great dramatist...

...A devout Methodist, she does wonder whether Jesus could possibly have been a Baptist, but she can like and accept the Mexican Baptist boy who assures her that Jesus was, and be as much delighted as she is amazed that Genesis exists in Spanish...

...Katie Bell, the younger Jackson daughter, has a crush on Estaquio, that Baptist boy, a crush that seems doomed...

...Habitually manipulative, Josie controls not only her husband and children, but her nieces and nephew, too...

...Allied with Thurman, a son who is indeed her son, she drives her nephew to suicide and condemns one of her nieces to sterile semidependency...

...She takes the strictures of her Methodism seriously, but not so seriously that she cannot assure the daughter who sneaks out to a movie that she is not, therefore, on her way to Hell...

...Jackson, whose intellectual horizons may run the gamut from A to not quite B, but whose soul is larger even than Texas...

...And the community so extends itself to the audience that we sigh in pleasure touched with tears when Willis can at last hold Myra's hands because he is free to propose to her...

...She is cheated over and over again of the house that the money her father has set aside for her ought to have enabled her to own...

...And even as we laugh at Katie Bell and doubt that she will ever sing "Rock of Ages" on key, much less in good Spanish, we're sure that she will find her way, if not to Mexico, then to a place in a community where, her mother's daughter, she will be open and motherly, too...

...The first, Talking Pictures, which ran from September 23 through October 23,1994, is set, as are most of Foote's plays, in Harrison, Texas, the mythical seat of his personal Yokna-patawpha County...

...It includes Willis, very much in love with Myra, whose romance is stymied because he hasn't enough money to divorce the wife who deserted him five years before...

...The audience becomes part of his world, as it should, for Foote's plays are very much about us...

...Using her "health" as a weapon, Josie traps her family for most of Laura Lee's youth in two rooms in a hotel and later in a small apartment...

...She values only money, partly as an end in itself and even more as a source of power...

...The play's final moments make manifest the utter emptiness of their lives when Thurman, childless partner in a marriage driven by hate, having achieved the presidency of the bank which is the family's source of power, an office which was to prove that he had "made something of himself," proves instead to be meaningless...

...Laura Lee, pretty and popular, is cheated of her chance to marry, both by her family's machinations and her own inability to break free...

...Myra's love for her son, Pete, and Willis's love for her, make clear to the boy their value as he watches his father's hollow-ness betray itself...

...But the community works...

...In Commonweal ("Horton Foote's Many Roads Home," February 26,1988) I wrote about his lifelong meditation on what makes America succeed in spite of itself...

...Jackson succeeded in being as funny as she was earth-motherly, and Samantha Reynolds was wholly endearing as Katie Bell...

...In Night Seasons, Jean Stapleton made Josie Weems, despite her awfulness, human, sometimes touching, and sometimes quite funny...

...The talkies may end Myra's career, but they, like the silents they replace, will open the world of those denizens of Harrison who can see beyond their noses...

...The season continues from January 27 through February 26, 1995, with The Young Man from Atlanta and concludes March 10 through April 9 with Laura Dennis...

...Horton Foote's plays sell out fast...

...Gladys turns up, ready, as is her nature, to disrupt...

...And Josie contemplates with dread the three more years she must live if her sons are to escape inheritance taxes on the one bit of property Thurman somehow failed earlier to secure...

...Not so much a mother as a matriarch, she presides over tragedy rather than comedy as she quite deliberately refuses to make a home...