Horton Foote is sitting in an orchestra seat at the Booth Theatre on Broadway before a Wednesday matinee of Dividing the Estate.
There is a look of concern on his face but ask him what he is thinking about and he will say he is just amazed by his good fortune.
“I can't get over the fact that I can go into many places in New York and people know who I am,'' he says. “I never really know who I am myself.''
At 92, Foote cuts a gentlemanly figure of serenity. He exudes an uncommon grace and compassion for someone who has survived as long as he has in the treacherous shoals of American theatre.
If there are scars, he isn't flaunting them.
This is Foote's first play on Broadway since his Pulitzer prize-winning The Young Man From Atlanta in 1997.
But you wouldn't know it from his manner, which is as steady, sensitive and slyly humorous as any of his dramas that have chronicled the hope and heartbreak of that little corner of Texas he long ago rechristened “Harrison''.
(As literary ZIP codes go, Harrison, Texas, is as well-mapped as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.)
“When I first tried writing a play, I was so naive I didn't know that you couldn't use the actual names,'' Foote recalls.
“So I wrote a one-act called ‘Wharton Dance' and used all of my friends' names. Some of them were doing things their parents didn't know they did. No one told me that you couldn't do this. I thought they would be delighted. But they weren't, so I quickly changed the name of Wharton to Harrison.''
The cadences of Foote's sentences are those of a storyteller who respects his material too much to sensationalise it or rush it along.
Listening to him talk is a little like sitting beside a brook that flows at its own leisurely pace, quietly transporting earthly life in its flow.
When asked if he sees the rhythm of his plays as a corrective to the hyped-up barrage of modern life, he pauses courteously to consider before conceding: “I'm not aware of that mission but I am aware that my plays have a certain tone.
“My parents liked the idea of Pasadena because they thought it would be a very safe place to study. And it was away from Broadway and New York,'' he says with soft, nostalgic laughter.
Just a few years later, this young man from Texas would become a New Yorker and a founding member of the American Actors Company, where the dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille, who had been doing improvisational exercises with him, encouraged him to begin writing.
These disciplines of acting and writing were in rivalry for a time, until a review helped him clarify which path to choose.
“Brooks Atkinson was the dean of the New York critics and he came down to see my play Texas Town and for some reason liked it very much,'' Foote recalls. “He loved all the acting, except for one: mine.''
His apprenticeship as a playwright officially began. “If you read Atkinson's review, you'd think I knew what I was doing, but I didn't. I went to Agnes and said, ‘I'm stymied here.' And she said, ‘Write about what you know,' and whether for good or bad, that's what I've been doing.''
When pressed on the subject of the relationship between fact and fiction in his plays, he offers no more than “I'm a storyteller. I don't know what my method is. I only know that if material fascinates me, I'll go to the ends of the Earth to do it. That has really been the secret.''
uccess for Foote has been more long haul than windfall. His plays The Trip to Bountiful (starring Lillian Gish) and The Traveling Lady (starring Kim Stanley) were presented on television and Broadway in the 1950s but it was his Oscar-winning screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962 that considerably raised his profile.
Although he won a second Oscar for writing 1983's Tender Mercies and Geraldine Page capped her glorious career with an Oscar for the 1985 film version of Bountiful, Foote says he doesn't think of himself as a film writer.
When inspiration hits, his instinct typically tells him: “This would make a good play.''
Dividing the Estate, which was first produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1989, couldn't have emerged at a more apt time — in fact, it is uncanny how the work speaks to the present economic turmoil.
The production, directed by Michael Wilson, was rapturously received at its Primary Stages premiere last year off-Broadway and the Broadway engagement, produced by Lincoln Centre Theatre, has been equally celebrated.
Elizabeth Ashley, who plays the matriarch, heads a cast that includes Foote's daughter, Hallie, and her husband, Devon Abner.
Although Foote has taken up yoga and routinely faces an active day, he no longer drives and has become more dependent on his family. Asked how his health is holding up, he jokes: “Depends on your definition of health.''
More complicated, perhaps, is the question of how his approach to playwriting may have altered since reaching his upper seniority.
“You know there are new forces, new interests at work. I'm just discovering all of this. I ask a lot of questions but get few answers.''
