Master of Quiet Heartbreak, 85, Debuts in O.C.

Spend 61 years as a professional playwright and one of your works is bound to be a total washout.

Horton Foote just never expected it to happen quite the way it did three weeks ago in Houston, where his newest play, “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” premiered at the Alley Theatre.

The critics were more than kind--”quietly gripping,” said the Dallas Morning News. “The writing shines with Foote’s characteristic strengths,” applauded the Houston Chronicle.

But the elements were more than cruel. Tropical Storm Allison hit Houston on June 8, the third night of the show’s run. By the time the rains and floods receded, they had caused more than 20 deaths in the city. The Alley’s 296-seat, basement-level second stage, the Neuhaus Arena, had been turned into a swimming pool--Foote said water was up to the lighting rig. Floating in it were a table and chairs that were part of the stage set.

Four performances were canceled, and though the Alley remains out of commission, it was able to transfer “The Carpetbagger’s Children” to an undamaged Houston theater to resume its run, featuring Jean Stapleton and Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter who often performs in his plays.

A flooded-out play “is just unheard of,” said Foote, who is the fifth generation of his family to live near Houston. He still resides in his ancestral hometown of Wharton, 50 miles away, and can recall no similar devastation.

It also is unheard of for an 85-year-old writer to have two new plays premiere in the space of seven months, win raves for both and have a third in the pipeline. Not to mention completing the second volume of his memoirs, “Beginnings,” which will be published in November.

“The Last of the Thorntons,” set in a Texas nursing home, premiered in December in New York. “Wonderful and heartbreaking,” wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times. “Once more . . . the master of the eloquence of understatement has tugged the heart to the point of breaking--quietly, but surely,” hailed the Christian Science Monitor.

Now comes “Getting Frankie Married--and Afterwards,” which has its first public airing this morning in a staged reading at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. It’s the first step in a development process that will lead to a world premiere on South Coast’s Mainstage in April.

Foote arrived this week in Costa Mesa and was greeted by sunny Southern California weather. No rains threatened as the soft-voiced, placid and personable playwright chatted Wednesday in the lobby of his hotel before heading to the nearby theater for a rehearsal.

Like most of Foote’s plays, “Getting Frankie Married” is set in Harrison, a fictitious small Texas town modeled after Wharton, and its subject is the painful legacies that can be handed down in families from generation to generation. Quiet heartbreak is in the offing once more.

Foote’s honors include a Pulitzer Prize (in 1995, for his play “The Young Man From Atlanta”), two screenwriting Oscars (for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and his original screenplay for “Tender Mercies”), an Emmy (for his adaptation of William Faulkner’s story “Old Man”) and a National Medal of Arts bestowed on him last year by President Clinton. He even can claim theatrical seniority over Arthur Miller, who also remains an active creative force at 85. Foote’s first play, “Wharton Dance,” was produced in 1940; Miller didn’t debut with “The Man Who Had All the Luck” until 1944.

The staged reading for “Getting Frankie Married” is part of South Coast’s annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, an event that exemplifies the gradualist, collaborative method of shepherding new plays toward the stage through a series of readings and/or workshop productions.

Given all his laurels, his mastery of his very specific milieu and his six decades of professional experience setting pen to page--he still writes in ink on lined notebook paper--one might presume Foote to be in a class of playwrights who don’t need a workshop to tell them what works.

But he is all for the play development process--pioneered during the mid-1960s by director Lloyd Richards--especially given his sour memories of how it was done in the old days.

Foote left Wharton at age 16 to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He moved to New York and found that playwriting, rather than acting, was where his talent and obsessions lay. In those days, plays would be mounted publicly in Boston and other outlying cities, then brought to Broadway, which was then the only significant outlet for new plays. The pressure to “fix” plays during their out-of-town runs was intense, Foote said. Producers, bombarded with advice from all quarters, including reviewers, would harangue playwrights for changes, insisting that without them the show would never open in New York.

“It was a barbaric system,” Foote said. “I find it so much more helpful having readings of the play and talking to people you trust.”

The workshop process also allows Foote to indulge in one of his chief pleasures: watching a play come together.

“I love rehearsal,” he said. “You see, I’m crazy about actors.”

As Foote sees it, “So many writers, I think, make the mistake of talking to actors in [terms of] results. If you tell them, ‘You’re angry here,’ that’s an obvious thing, that’s a result. How they arrive at that anger is their process and what makes the actor [an artist].”

For Foote, watching the three-woman cast of “The Carpetbagger’s Children” adapt to a new theater on a day’s notice after the Houston flood provided a silver lining to a devastating cloudburst.

“It seemed like they’d never been anyplace else. Actors are remarkable. They accept challenges and it brings out the best in them.”

* “Getting Frankie Married--and Afterwards,” reading on South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Today, 10 a.m. $8. (714) 708-5555.

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Talk about ironic titles: “Traveling Light,” an evening of eight short plays about vacationers, will be the next offering from New Voices Playwrights Workshop--a company that has turned nomadic while searching for a home.

New Voices’ tenancy at the DePietro Performance Center in Santa Ana ended abruptly three weeks ago in a landlord-tenant dispute; the group salvaged its show, “Carnivals of Desire,” by transferring on short notice to the nearby Grand Central Art Center.

Now it’s on to Anaheim Hills, where “Traveling Light” will open at the Chance Theater on Aug. 18.