Theater: Peter Norton Space / 555 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Set in Foote's fictitious town of Harrison, Texas and based partly on the childhood of Foote's father and the courtship and marriage of his parents, The Orphans' Home Cycle is a wide-ranging, intricate work.
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December 18, 2009: “Roberta!” the drunken man calls out in his sleep, his voice as lonely as a train whistle on a prairie. A little boy who overhears him thinks it sounds as if somebody were being murdered. But the man’s roommates in a small-town boarding house in Harrison, Tex., are more perplexed than alarmed. “Who’s Roberta?” they ask one another.
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December 17, 2009: When we last left our intrepid Texan hero, Horace Robedaux (Bill Keck), at the end of the superb part 1 of Horton Foote's epic nine-play The Orphans Home Cycle — don't worry if you haven't seen part 1, it's still running at Off Broadway's Signature Theatre, and it's not a prerequisite for part 2 — he was on a train, being prayed over by busybody Baptist Mrs. Coons (Pamela Payton Wright). Over the course of the first three plays, Horace saw his father die of alcoholism and his mother remarry a man who despised him but loved his sister; he was shipped off to a plantation to work alongside convicts for a paranoid plantation owner; and as a grown man, he was shunned again by his own family. As Mrs. Coons asks, ''Father of mercy!'' Please let something good happen to poor Horace!
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December 17, 2009: When last we met Horace Robedaux, the main character in Horton Foote’s nine-play epic “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” he was in a bad way – penniless, feverish, all but abandoned by his family, praying on a train with an elderly stranger. That was the end of Part I (here is my review of Part I). At the beginning of Part II, two years later, we first see Horace dancing…with several women. Times are looking up.
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December 18, 2009: Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle, at the Signature Theatre in a co-production with Hartford Stage, continues to impress. Part Two, subtitled "The Story of a Marriage," builds on the excellent groundwork laid out in the first segment of this three-part, nine-play epic as it tells the story of Horace Robedaux (Bill Heck), who leaves behind his troubled boyhood and embarks upon life with his wife, Elizabeth (Maggie Lacey).
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December 31, 2010: In accordance with the Law of Trilogies (which I last invoked for The Coast of Utopia), the second part of Horton Foote’s immensely satisfying Orphans’ Home Cycle is fraught and full of darkness. That’s only to be expected from middle parts (which I generally prefer): Stakes remain high, the ending is far off and our hero realizes that a long, hard road lies ahead. In Foote’s nine-play, three-part epic about the youth and adulthood of Horace Robedaux (based on his father’s life), we see a man with a painful past trying to build a future.
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