About the Play:

Vernon Early has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Vernon Early is a full-length drama by Horton Foote. The titular doctor Vernon Early is an honest and devoted small-town pediatrician, but when the townsfolk need a doctor to lend a reassuring hand and a pill, he's there, even in the middle of the night. (You ask, house calls? It's 1950, and we're in Harrison, Texas.)

Vernon Early revisits American life in Horton Foote's fictional town of Harrison, Texas, during the 1950s. The title character, Vernon, is a pediatrician, working back when the house call was commonplace. A rich but sad man consumed by his work, Vernon's spirit has been eroded by the day-to-day grind. The depressed doctor finds no comfort from his deadened relationship with his well-meaning wife Mildred, once a beauty queen, though you wouldn't guess that now. She doesn't have much inner beauty, either – but, to be fair, both she and Vernon endured a terrible blow 20 years earlier when the three-year-old they'd come to love and were in the process of adopting was abruptly taken from them when its mother changed her mind. Mildred is unable to see her husband’s spiritual sickness and is always ready to throw money at the problem ("Let's take a cruise!"), but Vernon is too substantial a man to let that assuage the grief as she and his friends come to see. Mirroring the tragic existence of the Earlys, many of Harrison's other residents are also consumed with the self-inflicted wounds of life: aging, individual isolation, love, and racial inequality. Through all of the bleakness of life there still shines a glimmer of hope reflected in the spirit of the town's sad doctor: Vernon Early.

Vernon Early premiered in 1998 at The Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama. While the play is rarely performed professionally, it has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops.

Cast: 7 female, 5 male

What people say:

"…Foote fans and scholars will find much resonance in a poignant and haunting drama about the sadness, depression and regret that come with growing older…like most of Foote's later plays, this is a multi-layered work with such rich characters that they continue to haunt the mind after the final curtain." — Variety

"To pinpoint the center of Foote's genius is difficult. His characters are certainly so real that we feel immediately that we know them. But with any one of his plays we quickly become aware that our knowledge has been superficial, of the surface only, that these characters have depths we not only didn't know but never even suspected …Vernon Early has few equals and no superiors in its ability to engross the theatergoer." — Montgomery Advertiser (Alabama)

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.