Dividing the Estate

MOURNING IN AMERICA Fuller, Foote, and Ashley, from left, deal with loss in the Reagan era.

James Leynse

The decay of values, both in property and personal conduct, is the subject of Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s latest elegy for small-town America. Set once again in fictional Harrison, Texas—which the nonagenarian playwright, in the course of his distinguished career, has populated to a point where it could rival many actual burgs—the play concerns the parceling out of a large rural estate in the late 1980s. (There are allusions to a backstory that was explored in Foote’s The Carpetbagger’s Children.) The Texas economy is shriveling, and a culture of empty alacrity has replaced the simpler, more genteel way of life that once prevailed. Foote is not naive about the olden days, whose injustices and painful repressions he has amply chronicled, but he is acutely sensitive to the coarseness of modern priorities.

First performed in 1989, the nuanced and compelling Dividing the Estate is only now receiving its New York premiere, and Foote couldn’t have hoped for a better production than the one Michael Wilson has devised for Primary Stages. The smokestack-voiced Elizabeth Ashley is aptly formidable as the ornery Stella, the matriarch of an increasingly splintered clan; Penny Fuller (as her reliable daughter) and Gerald McRaney (as her cowed son, a failure at the few things he has tried) provide admirable support. But it is Hallie Foote—in a hilariously puckered turn as Stella’s joyless, grasping third child—who winds up putting the play in her pocket. Her performance has a lingering acridity: the faintly junky smell of the winds of change.