The Old Friends

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You might think that the late Horton Foote would’ve wanted nothing to do with the “flamboyant prose poetry” of his near contemporary Tennessee Williams, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. Foote’s explorations of life in small-town Harrison, Texas, were generally finely drawn, understated affairs. During most of his long career, they generated acclaim but not the box-office success of Williams’s plays. Yet here arrives a previously unproduced work that appears to have been Foote’s bid to prove that he could do melodrama as well as his peer. “Truth to tell, he couldn’t—not quite.” This alcohol-and-hedonism-filled drama about rich Texans and their poorer relatives feels unfinished in places. But it’s still a “powerfully engrossing” character study.

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The clunkiness mostly comes early, says Marilyn Stasio in Variety. As we’re introduced to a fading matriarch (Lois Smith), a grasping daughter (Veanne Cox), and a handful of other clan members, Foote’s script is so slow to establish everyone’s relationships that the scene-changing news of a sudden death “lands with a thud.” Fortunately, sparks then begin to fly. Though you’ll wish Foote were still alive to tighten the play, “it certainly couldn’t have received a more effective production than it does here,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. Among an ensemble of performers who are uniformly brilliant, Betty Buckley is “the undeniable standout” as a fabulously wealthy, booze-swilling family friend. Director Michael Wilson, in turn, navigates the play’s emotional twists and turns deftly, “staging even its more over-the-top scenes with a steady hand.”

“The Old Friends can border dangerously, if enjoyably, on camp,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. But though the Borden-Price household may “dress and talk fancier” than the Texans of The Trip to Bountiful, “these people are as scared, lonely, and thwarted as anyone Foote ever created.” Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter, brings “elegant, anchoring lucidity” to Sibyl, “the character most likely to pull on your heartstrings.” Yet even the once-regal family matriarch “makes you understand why the working title for The Old Friends was once The Dispossessed.” Smith makes Mamie Borden “heartbreakingly tentative,” stung by neglect and painfully aware of her own mortality. Like so many of the second-generation rich folks around her, she’s “unmoored in a way that guarantees shipwrecks.”