A culture dwindles away in 'Dividing the Estate'
NEW YORK - So much family history runs through Horton Foote's comedy Dividing the Estate, so much who-died-how and who-dissed-whom, that it threatens to suffocate the plot. And much of the history is extraneous.
NEW YORK - So much family history runs through Horton Foote's comedy
Dividing the Estate,
so much who-died-how and who-dissed-whom, that it threatens to suffocate the plot. And much of the history is extraneous.
It's the present that counts with this acrimonious Southern family, hanging on to a multi-acre estate and former farm wedged amid highways and fast-food joints an hour outside Houston. They are the last of a breed, embers of a lifestyle dissolving in the late '80s, the play's setting.
In the manner of the old South, they address one another by kinship, not by given name: Brother, Aunt, Mother-in-Law, Nephew. I was glad they did, because it's tough to figure out the players without the family tree in this transplant to Broadway by Lincoln Center Theatre, from Off-Broadway's Primary Stages where the production debuted last season. The play was first produced at Princeton's McCarter Theatre in 1989.
The estimable Foote, 92, whose plays include
The Trip to Bountiful
and the screenplay for
To Kill a Mockingbird
, delivers a diverting look at a brawling family. The play's meat is endless squabbling over whether to sell off an estate that dates almost to the Confederacy. But its essence is about the way American progress divides the cultural estate as the last century ambles to a close.
Those new VCRs let everyone - everyone! - view
Gone With the Wind
whenever their Dixie hearts desire. And those Asians - Vietnamese or Taiwanese or what? - are the town's new captains and soldiers of industry.
What's an elitist Southern family to do? Fight, fight, fight - among themselves. The mildly funny bickering in
Dividing the Estate
, which grows more comical as the situation becomes more dire, is this family's template for kinship. Given the opportunities for zingers, the play itself could be more amusing.
Still, its character development gives
Dividing the Estate
the hook to hold us through an evening that examines tax dodges and falling land sales and, more to the point, the greed that sets a generation of beneficiaries apart from its forebears.
The play uneasily straddles the divide between comedy and caustic comment, on Jeff Cowie's detailed and elegant multi-room estate set. What balance it has comes from a 13-member cast that gives the play a starkly realistic feel. (The current economy also adds up-to-date flavoring.)
All-around actress Elizabeth Ashley plays the unshakable matriarch - no land sells while she breathes - with one part self-assurance and two parts royal entitlement. Penny Fuller, Gerald McRaney and Hallie Foote (the playwright's daughter, terrific in her desperate avarice) are her grown and dependent offspring. Devon Abner is her grandson, who runs the place.
The supporting cast, also on target, includes another cultural anachronism: the life-long African American house staff, with Pat Bowie as the cook and Arthur French as the 92-year-old general servant.
Dividing the Estate
At the Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St., New York. Tickets: $76.50 to $96.50. Information: 1-800-432-7250 or
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