About
the Play:
Spring Dance has long been a favourite of acting teachers
for Female Monologues.
The Roads to Home is a full-length drama by Horton
Foote. This trilogy of evocative and beautifully written
independent one-acts with overlapping characters blends humour and
poignance as they probe gently into the crises besetting a group of
Texas friends and neighbours.
In the first play, A Nightingale, Mabel and Vonnie, two
Houston neighbours and best friends, both refugees from small Texas
towns, are forbearing and patient about the protracted and uninvited
visits of Annie Long, a girlhood acquaintance of Mabel's whose
inability to cope with the murder of her banker father causes her to
slip inexorably into insanity. As uncomfortable as Annie makes them,
Mabel and Vonnie are more concerned with silencing her vivid
recounting of old scandals and the pain they caused. (Cast: 3 female,
1 male)
In the second play, The
Dearest of Friends,
it is several months later, and Vonnie is facing the crisis of a
husband who is involved with another woman and who wants a divorce.
Mabel and her husband, Jack, are sympathetic to Vonnie's plight but,
again, cannot bring themselves to face its disturbing implications.
(Cast: 2
female, 2
male)
In the third play, Spring Dance, several years have passed,
and Annie is now confined to an upscale asylum. She and her fellow
patients are scrupulously polite and considerate of each other and,
obviously, totally divorced from reality. The asylum culture reflects
the larger culture – but here the isolation is total and sadly
irreversible. (Cast: 1 female, 3 male)
The Roads to Home premiered in 1982 at Manhattan's Punch
Line Theatre off-off-Broadway in New York City. Its West Coast
premiere was in 2002 at Lost Studio in Hollywood. The
play enjoyed
an exquisite
revival by off-Broadway's Primary Stages in
2016 and
has become
a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops.
What people say:
"…A loving, fierce portrait
of a sweet-tempered brutal culture…a society built on kindness and
discretion, with no system for dealing with less well-behaved
feelings – like terror, anguish, and passion." — Village
Voice
"…A literate, touching
play." — The New York Times
"Foote reaffirms his abiding
gentleness with tender people caught in tough situations…this HOME
is a lovely place to visit." — New York Post
About the Playwright:
Horton Foote (1916-2009) was a prolific American playwright
and screenwriter with an ear for the resilient spirit of daily life
in the small-town southern US states. Known as a writer's writer, he
switched readily from the stage to television and film. He received
Academy Awards for his screenplay adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird
and his original screenplay Tender Mercies. During the Golden Age of
television, he authored numerous notable live television dramas. For
his 1997 television adaptation of William Faulkner's "Old Man,"
he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing of a Miniseries. He
received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and his first Tony nomination for
his play, The Young Man From Atlanta.