In 2006, KERA’s Lee Cullum talked with Horton Foote about his work, his love of Texas and his childhood memories growing up in Wharton, Texas. Watch video excerpts of the interview. As a theater critic, KERA's Jerome Weeks met and wrote about Foote many times over the years. Listen to or read  his appreciation of the playwright who died Wednesday.

Overview
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On writing
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On Texas
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  • Ben Brantley's column in the New York Times about how Foote's treatment of home was chillier than that:  "both the prison you can never run away from and the sanctuary you can never find the entrance to"
  • KERA radio story:
  • Expanded online appreciation:

Obituaries described Horton Foote, who died Wednesday, as a great storyteller, a writer of ordinary Americans. To me, these sound just a little condescending. For them, Foote is not a great dramatist. He’s a great storyteller – as if he were some folksy character on a front porch.

It’s easy to get this impression. I held it at first. Some of Foote’s earliest works – like The Trip to Bountiful – were written for television, and they remain some of his most popular. They’re also his most sentimental. The characters here express what they feel and act on those feelings. The small town settings, the homey qualities: Nothing much will surprise you.

But Foote became a more sophisticated writer than that. The change was apparent with the 1983 film, Tender Mercies, in which Robert Duvall plays a washed-up country singer.

In Tender Mercies – and in plays from the same period – the characters often don’t know what they want. So what happens sometimes doesn’t reflect what they’re telling us.

It’s why Foote’s later plays can take unexpected turns. And it’s why they suggest these great depths of unexpressed feelings. Foote wrote a cycle of 9 plays called Orphans’ Home. His writing here is pared away. Yet he gives his hometown of Wharton, outside of Houston, the full Faulkner treatment. He chronicles the place from convict laborers to local aristocrats.

Orphans’ Home: Even the title seems quaint. But it’s actually taken from a poem by Marianne Moore, and it describes all of our lives on this planet ("The world's an orphans' home").

Whenever I met Foote, he was always the courtly, friendly gentleman the obituaries describe. But he was also a tougher, more determined character than that. He won the Pultizer Prize in 1995 – and he hadn’t had a play on Broadway for more than 40 years. When he died in Hartford, Foote was working on a stage production for this fall. He was adapting Orphans’ Home. He was 92 and he’d started writing it 35 years ago.

Whenever I met him, Foote was dressed the same way. Navy-blue, double-breasted blazer, grey slacks, velvet slippers. Simple, dapper but comfortable. Foote was the son of a haberdasher, so he knew what he was doing.

And he stuck with it.

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