Horton Foote's THE TRAVELING LADY Comes to Seattle, 5/13

As Spring makes its way to Seattle, ESP goes to Texas for a typically beautifully-made play by the late, great Horton Foote, author of, among many works, The Trip to Bountiful, and the screenplays of Tender Mercies and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Only one of twelve (!) plays written in a two-year period, The Traveling Lady had its Broadway premiere in 1954, in a production that featured the celebrated Kim Stanley as the title character, and (though it seems improbable, after his years on the old Hawaii Five-0) Jack Lord as the shy young widower who falls in love with her and her little girl. Kim Stanley subsequently repeated the role twice for live television. (Foote re-conceived the story for the Steve McQueen film Baby, the Rain Must Fall, with Lee Remick, in 1965.)

The play, set in Foote's beloved fictional town of Harrison, unfolds gently but inexorably, and all in the back porch and yard of a single house. A young mother has come to meet her husband on the day he is due to be paroled from prison; what the whole town knows is that the husband has already been out of jail for some weeks...

The play is, in part, a rumination on grief - grief both for the dead (the story begins on the day of a funeral), and for roads not taken; and the winding way life has of moving us forward. It is a play firmly grounded in its place, which, paradoxically, increases its universality. There is great craft going on under the clear-eyed observation of ordinary life - and yet Foote has such sympathy for his people that it almost seems rude to call them characters. As Foote veteran Robert Duvall said, "Horton affords an actor a great deal of room to work in a very personal and private way. When you do a Horton Foote project, it's like you're going home."

Horton Foote (1916-2009) was a prolific writer, who, like some other playwrights ESP favors, saw his plain-spoken work go out of fashion in his own lifetime; luckily, he lived long enough to see its rediscovery. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, for The Young Man from Atlanta, and received the National Medal of Arts in 2000. In New York, the Signature Theatre spearheaded a major revival of his works in 2006. One of his major efforts is entitled The Orphan's Home Cycle - nine plays about the fictional Robedaux clan, drawn from events in the lives of his mother and father, and their families and friends, in early 20th Century Texas. (A Robedaux makes a cameo appearance in The Traveling Lady.) Three of these plays (1918, On Valentine's Day, and Courtship) were filmed in the late eighties - after the sudden (and to some, surprising) success of the film of The Trip to Bountiful - and they are definitely worth your time, as will the ESP reading be!

The Traveling Lady reading will be directed by Cynthia White, with a cast including (at the time of issue of this email) Mark Anders, Lisa Carswell, Susan Corzatte, Dan Kremer, Kate Kremer, Eric Riedmann, Jane Ryan, and Faye B Summers.

The reading will begin at 7 p.m. on Monday, May 13 at the Stage One Theatre on the North Seattle Community College Campus. There will be the usual wine-o cheese-o in the lobby after.

Admission is by donation, and BAH-ba-da-rum pum pum pah! We are proud to announce that ESP isnow powered by Shunpike, and as such has non-profit status and donations are tax deductible.

ESP is a confederation of Seattle theatre artists dedicated to presenting plays that seldom get full productions. In the present economic straits in which regional theatre now finds itself, much of the so-called established international repertoire is neglected, for various reasons: there are too many different settings, or the casts are too large, or, simply, the publicity requirements of selling a play that is both "old" and unfamiliar to general audiences may seem too daunting.

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