Nothing concentrates the mind like money _ or lack of it. And money has provided the plot for more than a few plays, one good example being "Dividing the Estate," Horton Foote's hilariously perceptive take on what good old-fashioned greed does to one cash-strapped Texas family.
Foote's gentle domestic comedy was one of last season's off-Broadway highlights, courtesy of Primary Stages. Now Lincoln Center Theater has had the good sense to pick up the production and transfer the show, more or less intact, to Broadway's Booth Theatre, where it opened Thursday.
In one respect, "Dividing the Estate" is even more timely today than it was in October 2007. The play, under Michael Wilson's leisurely, low-key direction, is set in recession-plagued 1987. Prices are falling. Real estate is a mess. Jobs are being lost. And the members of a once well-off clan must confront their dwindling financial future. You can't get more up-to-date.
One of the great pleasures of Foote's plays is their sense of family history. Who is related to whom. Who got married. Who died. Who got rocked in scandal. And while you think you may be getting a laundry lists of incidents recited by the more senior members of the household, the playwright has something more on his mind.
Foote is quietly giving you not only the history of this family, headed by proud, cantankerous matriarch named Stella, but a sense of place. Foote loves the land and, most tellingly in this play, mourns the disappearance of small towns and the graceful old farms, done in by oil wells, fast-food restaurants and an expanding population.
Stella, portrayed with steely resolve by a vibrant Elizabeth Ashley, sums it all up in a few words that resonated off-Broadway and again make their mark on Broadway: "Don't talk to me about difficult times," she proclaims. "We got through the Depression, when people were abandoning their land, selling it all over this county, but my father held on to our land, scraped together the money to plant cotton every year, pay our taxes and keep body and soul together."
The problems, of course, are the body and soul of the present generation, personified by Mary Jo, Stella's quivering daughter, played to pouty perfection by Hallie Foote _ who happens to be the playwright's real-life offspring.
Mary Jo is relentlessly grasping, attune to every slight, real or imagined, and fearful of being cheated out of her inheritance. Yet Hallie Foote, awash in sniffs and sulks, manages to make the woman's greediness appealing and riotously funny.
That greed affects just about everyone else on stage, even the servants, although their sense of entitlement isn't as overwhelming as the avarice of other family members. They include Mary Jo's dissolute brother (a delightfully cranky Gerald McRaney), hobbled by a serious drinking problem and an affair with a much younger woman who works at Whataburger, the local fast-food establishment.
Penny Fuller portrays Mary Jo's more prim sister whose son (Devon Abner) presides over the running of the estate. He's the one practical member of the family, and, of course, its most boring one.
Yet there is a generosity of spirit in Foote's handiwork. He embraces all his creations, even the most mean-spirited of them. They are part of the fabric of everyday life in a small Texas town where such things as family squabbles over money are regular occurrences. And in "Dividing the Estate," Foote manages to make them highly theatrical.
