Review of reviews: Stage

Talking Pictures

Goodman Theatre, Chicago

(312) 443-3800

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★★★

Playwright Horton Foote has a reputation for being a bit “old-fashioned,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But this 1987 work remains surprisingly relevant. Set in the fictional town of Harrison, Texas, just prior to the Depression, Talking Pictures tells the story of Myra, a recently divorced pianist who ekes out a living providing music for the town’s silent-movie theater. When the arrival of the “talkies” threatens Myra’s meager livelihood, she and her teenage son, Pete, become boarders in the home of the Jacksons, a local family with troubles of their own. One of Foote’s major themes is how the residents of Harrison are “woefully slow to adapt” to modern life. But the sudden technological and economic changes these struggling characters face “aren’t much different than those that swirl around us now,” and Foote wryly suggests we’re quite as clueless.

Beneath the small-town, small-problem facade of Foote’s work lies a close-to-the-bone realism, said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Almost all of Foote’s plays are set in Harrison—a double for his hometown of Wharton. Now 92, he’s devoted himself to chronicling life in an insular Texas hamlet, and the result is a deep-rooted knowledge of his characters’ motivations. Jenny McKnight anchors this production as Myra, whose “serene surface is in beautiful tension with her volcanic emotions.” Bubba Weiler makes a delightfully hyperactive Pete, and an ensemble cast embodies the complicated Jackson clan. Under Henry Wishcamper’s direction, their everyday adventures play out in a “charming, semi-farcical but ultimately bittersweet” way. Certain playwrights know how to perfectly capture family relationships that encapsulate a particular milieu. “The Russians have Anton Chekhov. The Irish have Brian Friel. And we Americans have Horton Foote.”