Theater: Peter Norton Space / 555 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036
Synopsis:
Classical in its breadth and scope, The Orphans' Home Cycle begins with a father's death in a small-Texas town at the turn of the century, a loss that sends his son, Horace Robedaux, on an odyssey through the darkest corners of the heart as he learns to become a husband, father, and patriarch.
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January 27, 2010: Nobody in Harrison, Tex., needs to ask for whom the bell tolls. Not, at least, in 1918, the year that gives the title to the opening work in the reverberant final installment of Horton Foote’s “Orphans’ Home Cycle” at the Peter Norton Space on West 42nd Street.
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February 3, 2010: Before his death last year, Horton Foote finished condensing nine full-length, sequential dramas (written in the ’70s) into the nine-hour epic that we now know as the Orphans’ Home Cycle. But as the plays were boiled down to their essences, a rich and strange mutation occurred: Time became radically shortened. Events that should take about an hour of real stage time (a trip into town, a funeral, getting sick from influenza) now unfold in five or ten minutes, which ramps up drama and forces you to suspend disbelief. Maybe you always considered Foote’s aesthetic mode to be basic naturalism. In fact, he took nine plays and resculpted them into something elevated and elemental, like Greek tragedy.
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January 27, 2010: Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle: Part Three, now at Signature Theatre Company in a co-production with Hartford Stage, is 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.
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January 26, 2010: A cloud of sadness looms over The Story of a Family, the third and final installment in The Orphans' Home Cycle — and it's palpable even before the play's funereal beginning. It signals that Horton Foote's sublime trilogy is coming to a close; these are our last three hours with Horace Robedaux. Many of us have watched him grow from a sixth-grade dropout into a self-made businessman, from fatherless child to husband and father-to-be. Anyone who's seen Part 1: The Story of a Childhood or Part 2: The Story of a Marriage — neither of which are prerequisites for Family, by the way — has undoubtedly become extremely attached to Horace (Bill Heck, underplaying admirably), his selfless wife, Elizabeth (the lovely Maggie Lacey), his first-frosty-but-later-welcoming in-laws, the Vaughns (James DeMarse and Hallie Foote), and all their busybody kinfolk, friends, and neighbors.
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January 26, 2010: “How can human beings stand all that comes to them?” Horace asks in “The Story of a Family,” the last of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle.” It is 1918, people are dying of influenza at home or in combat overseas, but the question underlies Horton Foote’s entire nine-play cycle. And the answer, after nine hours watching an ensemble of some two dozen wonderful actors presenting 26 years in the life of Horace Robedaux and his extended family, is: They just do.
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