The Young Man from Atlanta

Young Man from Atlanta, The (1995), a play by Horton Foote.[Kampo Cultural Center, 24 perf.; Pulitzer Prize.] In the 1950s, grocery wholesaler Will Kidder (Ralph Waite) has just moved into his new $200,000 home when he is let go by the company for whom he has worked for nearly forty years. He decides to start his own business and hopes to use the money he gave his wife, Lily Dale (Carlin Glynn), and his late son, Bill, who committed suicide. But Will soon learns that both wife and son gave all their money to Bill's roommate, a young man from Atlanta, and Will is left to face a troubled and uncertain future. Since the young man never appears, audiences were left to decide whether he was a blackmailer or a sponging lover. Although it garnered mixed notices, the drama won the Pulitzer probably as recognition for Foote's long and dedicated career. A Broadway production featuring Rip Torn and Shirley Knight was mounted at the Longacre Theatre in 1997 but only lasted eighty‐eight performances. Horton FOOTE (b. 1916) was born in Wharton, Texas, and at the age of sixteen began his acting career as an apprentice at the Pasadena Playhouse. Foote's first plays were produced in the early 1940s, and by the 1950s he scripted several films and television dramas. In the 1970s he began his nine‐play cycle The Orphans' Home, based on his ancestors, about a Texas family from 1902 to 1928. Among his many other plays are Only the Heart (1942), The Chase (1952), The Trip to Bountiful (1953), The Widow Clare (1986), Lily Dale (1986), Talking Pictures (1994), and When They Speak of Rita (2000). Foote is known for his well‐made, solid, traditional form of playwriting that, in its quiet way, is sometimes very powerful. Autobiography: Beginnings, 2002.

Horton Foote
1995

The Young Man from Atlanta was first performed by the Signature Theatre Company in New York City in 1995, as part of a four-play series of Horton Foote's work. It was the third play produced during the season, following Talking Pictures and Night Seasons. The year concluded with Laura Dennis. Publication of The Young Man from Atlanta followed in American Theatre magazine during the same year. Subsequently, multiple publishers produced copies of the play, all of which were as of 2004 out of print or required special ordering. Interestingly, three of the work's main characters, Will Kidder, Lily Dale Kidder, and Pete Davenport, are characters from Foote's earlier plays. All three characters appear in works that are a part of Foote's nine-play cycle called The Orphan's Home, which he concluded writing in the 1970s. Although Foote began writing The Young Man from Atlanta in the early 1990s, the play is often considered to be a part of the cycle because of the Kidders' and Pete's reappearance.

Foote's writing career began in the late 1930s, so The Young Man from Atlanta is obviously one of the later works in his oeuvre. As an experienced writer, Foote does not shy away from sensitive and contemporary themes. In The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote explores grief, religious faith, homosexuality, suicide, race relations, the American dream, and deceit. As Ben Brantley remarked in his 1997 review for the New York Times, Foote is "a sly, compelling quiet playwright" who "operates from the assumption that life is a slow, steady series of unanswerable questions and losses against which there is finally no protection." According to Brantley, much of Foote's work is informed by the precept that "if you don't talk about the darkest aspects of life, then they don't exist." Indeed, Foote leaves much in this work unsaid, and for some, that is its greatest strength.

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