The dead son was gay.
That’s the thing never said, and barely even hinted at, in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta. And, in 2019, well, that feels awfully old-fashioned.
The Young Man From Atlanta, the Pulitzer Prize-winner that opened in a revival at the Signature Theatre tonight, is the rare Horton Foote play that’s not set in Harrison, Texas, the fictional version of his hometown. Instead we’re in the big city, Houston, but in the company of several characters familiar from other Foote plays. And, of course, we’re dealing with the usual Foote themes: How the world is changing, and how these familiar Texans are adapting to that change, or failing to.
The play is built around Will and Lily Dale Kidder, proper Houstonians. We first meet Will (Aidan Quinn) at his office, where he’s blabbering on about just how successful he’s been. It’s the 1950s, and he’s the embodiment of America’s postwar optimism — he helped build the company from nothing, he just built a new house, and he ordered his wife a new Packard. There’s one blemish on his fine record: His son, Bill, who’d been living in Atlanta, on a business trip to Florida walked into a lake and drowned. But Will, ever the optimist, is moving past that. Until he’s told that he’s being fired, that the company he helped build needs a younger, fresher salesman.
Will goes home, and we meet his wife, Lily Dale (Kristine Nielsen, usually so singular but here channelling Harriet Harris). Lily Dale, formerly a pianist and composer, has turned to religion since Bill’s death. She’s also staying in touch with Bill’s Atlanta roommate, that young man from Atlanta, despite Will’s insistence that she not. Worse, she’s been sending him money.
There’s an interesting story to tell about a man in middle age, who thinks he’s in the prime of his career, who finds himself unemployed. And this play partially tells it. But it’s also hung up on the question of Bill’s death, whether we should believe the stories told by his unseen roommate, that young man (Lily Dale relays his tales), or whether we should instead believe the distant relative who shows up from Houston, claiming that the roommate’s stories are all lies. And that’s much less interesting, because we’re not really invested in any of those young men, who all seem to be ciphers.
The play is directed by Michael Wilson, a frequent Foote interpreter, who presents a solid, straightforward production. The performances are equally solid and straightforward, livened somewhat by Nielsen’s restrained kookiness. The costumes, by Van Broughton Ramsey, are appropriately, straightforwardly, midcentury Texan, too. There are no surprises, except perhaps from Jeff Cowie’s set, an elegant, high-1950s living room, low and long, with a wall of windows and curtains always being opened and closed.
By the play’s end, Lily Dale finally sends the young man, Randy, back to Atlanta. Will decided to get another job. We never really learn what happened between the younger men, who is lying and who is telling the truth, whether Randy and Will were in fact lovers. That may be how things were in Houston in the 1950s. But on stage today, it doesn’t make for much drama.
