 |
The Orphans' Home Cycle Part One: The Story of a Childhood
Charts a Changing America
"The time of these plays is a harsh time. They begin in 1902, a time of far-reaching social and economic change in Texas… a way of life was over, and the practical, the pragmatic were scrambling to form a new economic order."
- Horton Foote, Introduction to Grove Press publication of
The Orphans' Home Cycle, 1988
At the dawn of the twentieth century the United States is assuming the role of a world power following its victory in the Spanish-American War. Big business in the North and East is supplanting the small, local merchant. Recent innovations such as the automobile, subway, and airplane are transforming the country. The population is shifting as more people leave farms and small towns to seek opportunities in industry in the cities, which increase from 40% of the U.S. population in 1900 to 46% in 1910. By 1910 a tide of nearly nine million immigrants from eastern, central, and southern Europe will have entered the country. The Progressive movement, led by intellectual urbanites, is calling for radical social changes such as prohibition and reforms in labor, education, race and gender relations, eventually leading to the founding of the International Workers of the World and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, among other organizations.
|
Henry Hodges and Dylan Riley Snyder
|
These revolutions are felt faintly and indirectly by the residents of the fictional town of Harrison, Texas, who, like much of the rural South, are still feeling the reverberations of the loss of the Civil War and the effects of Reconstruction. Two aristocratic Harrison families, the Thorntons and the Robedauxs, have both seen their fortunes plummet following the demise of the Old South and the fall of the plantation culture. Thornton daughter Corella, whose grandfather was the governor of Texas, and whose "plantation ran from here to the coast," has been reduced to sewing men's shirts in Houston after a failed attempt at running a boarding house with her sister. The Robedauxs, who once operated a profitable shipping fleet in Galveston, cannot afford the burial expenses or the cost of a tombstone for their son, Paul Horace. In the midst of this chaos and loss, a boy, Horace Robedaux, helplessly watches his family disintegrate as his father, Paul Horace Robedaux, lays dying and his mother, Corella Thornton Robedaux, makes plans to take his sister back with her to Houston and leave him behind in the care of his grandmother, aunt, and uncle. But soon he finds himself on his own.
So begins The Orphans' Home Cycle, Part One: The Story of a Childhood, the first third of Horton Foote's nine-play epic, which runs throughout Signature Theatre Company's 2009-2010 Season, in a co-production with Hartford Stage. Set between 1902 and 1910, the plays of The Story of a Childhood, Roots in a Parched Ground, Convicts, and Lily Dale, follow the coming-of-age of Horace Robedaux after he is sent out into the world at the age of twelve to begin a long and unpredictable path on his own to becoming a man and finding love and a home. Through Horace's eyes, the plays also present a breathtaking landscape of a changing America.
In The Orphans' Home Cycle, Foote charts a social history of Texas and the post-bellum South across a wide range of cultures and environments. From the Victorian, small town milieu of Roots in a Parched Ground he takes us to the violent wilderness of the second play, Convicts, in which Horace follows his uncle, Albert, to the Gautier Plantation. The Gautiers, like the Robedauxs and Thorntons, are members of the fallen Southern aristocracy and have been torn apart through whiskey and accusations of cheated inheritance. Soll Gautier, a Confederate veteran and relic of the Old South, utilizes convict labor as a replacement for the slaves and tenants who once worked his land. Convict leasing was a practice employed throughout the South following the Civil War: prisons contracted their convicts out to private individuals and corporations, including railroads, mining companies, and plantations as a way of generating income towards the South's collapsed economy, as well as providing unlimited labor to the plantations, which had lost their work force of slaves following Emancipation. There was little oversight of convict work camps by state prisons and convicts were overworked and subjected to brutal living conditions, including beatings, whipping, and vermin-infested food.
Jenny Dare Paulin and Bill Heck
| |
For Lily Dale, the third play of the cycle and final act of The Story of a Childhood, Foote draws us away from the devastated rural landscape of Roots in a Parched Ground and Convicts, to Houston, a city which in 1910 is experiencing massive growth and vitality. Following the Civil War the city has become a major hub of commercial transportation with the expansion of its port and railroads. Houston overtook its major commercial rival, Galveston, after the 1900 Galveston Hurricane caused many Galveston businesses and residents to flee to Houston. Perhaps most significantly, the 1901 discovery of oil at Spindletop, ninety miles outside of Houston, will identify Texas with the oil business and Houston as the state's premiere city. These changes are embodied in Lily Dale's suitor, Will Kidder, who typifies the bright, optimistic enthusiasm of this new age, as well as Horace, who recognizes the possibilities and opportunities available to a young man in the city, and that to rise in this new world he will need a formal education.
For Orphans' Home Cycle director Michael Wilson, the plays speak to our American history and identity. "What's big to me about the cycle," he says, "is Horton's way of connecting all of us now, at this moment, to what it means to be American. You begin to understand the devastating impact of history, how history repeats itself, and how you can't escape it as an individual, a community, or a nation. It personalizes and humanizes something that otherwise would be an idea in a textbook. It puts a human face on it."
For all of its historical scope and breadth, the inspiration for The Orphans' Home Cycle came from a deeply personal place for Foote. Horace Robedaux is modeled after Horton Foote's father, Albert Foote, whose childhood in early 1900s Southeast Texas and adult life married to Horton Foote's mother, Harriet (Hallie) Gautier Brooks, closely mirrors Horace's story throughout The Orphans' Home Cycle. Like Horace, Albert Foote lost his father at a young age, spent time working in a plantation general store, and grew up separated from his mother and sister, who lived in Houston.
The town of Harrison, where Roots in a Parched Ground and much of Foote's other plays are set, is inspired by Foote's place of birth, Wharton, Texas, where he was born in 1916. Located on the banks of the Colorado River fifty-nine miles southwest of Houston and forty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Wharton was established in 1828 and incorporated in 1902. In 1900 its population numbered 1,689, which would grow to 9,150 by 2008.
Horton Foote's roots in the community can be traced back to his great-great-grandfather, Albert Clinton Horton, a colonel in the Texas Revolution and later the first lieutenant governor of Texas, who settled in Wharton in the early 1840s where he maintained a large plantation, Sycamore Grove. Albert Clinton Horton was said to have owned more than 150 slaves and to be one of the wealthiest men in Texas, but he lost most of his fortune during the Civil War. Foote based the vivacious and music-loving Thorntons on the Horton clan and the intellectual, serious-minded Robedauxs on the Footes, who like their fictional counterparts, came to Wharton by way of Galveston, destitute after the Civil War. Like the Robedauxs of The Orphans' Home Cycle, the Footes were an educated family, and included among their sons a Greek and Latin scholar, John Robedeaux Foote, who with his brother, Stephen Austin Foote, founded the town newspaper, The Wharton Spectator, in 1888.
As a child, Foote played with other local boys in Wharton's surrounding woods and pastures, but he spent as much if not more time with adults, listening to their stories of Wharton's past, particularly of the time before his birth, during the intense period of transition and upheaval that The Orphans' Home Cycle chronicles. Although he has said that the plays are based on family stories and "all of the minutiae that make family life at once so interesting and yet at times so burdening," he also sees another undercurrent running through them, in which characters find themselves forced into resiliency, whether it is accepting loss, going to work, or leaving home. "…these plays I feel, are about change," he has said, "unexpected, unasked for, unwanted, but change to be faced and dealt with or else we sink into despair or hopeless longing for a life that is gone."
[back to top]
|
|
