‘Children’ skirts its epic potential

Venerable playwright Horton Foote examines the ties that bind -- and sometimes strangle -- in “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” now receiving its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory.

The play is set in the tiny Texas town of Harrison, Foote’s favorite fictional locale. “Getting Frankie Married -- and Afterwards,” which had its world premiere last season at SCR under the direction of the company’s artistic director Martin Benson, also was set in Harrison.

Benson’s direction of “Children” is his first such outing on SCR’s magnificent new Julianne Argyros Stage. Nan Martin and Linda Gehringer, cast members from “Frankie,” return for this latest Foote offering, along with newcomer Robin Pearson Rose.

The Tony-, Oscar- and Pulitzer-winning Foote, now in his mid-80s, is most famous for his adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and his original screenplay for “Tender Mercies,” but his extensive body of work for the stage is arguably his most impressive artistic contribution. Those familiar with Foote’s gentle regional rhythms may find this recent piece, which premiered last year at the Alley Theatre in Houston before playing at New York’s Lincoln Center, as sweet and sweeping in theme as previous plays but so stripped down in dramatic structure as to seem oddly static.

The drama consists of a series of monologues delivered by three sisters reflecting on their family history in specific and sometimes laborious detail. The chain of reminiscences spans the years from the Civil War to the play’s setting, shortly after World War II. Cornelia and Grace Anne (Rose and Martin, respectively) are elderly women; Sissie (Gehringer) who died some years before, apparently speaks from beyond the grave.

Offspring of one of the town’s richest men, the sisters enjoyed a certain power and prestige in the community. But they also faced opprobrium stemming from the fact that their father, a Union soldier, was a reputed carpetbagger who amassed the bulk of his 20,000-acre estate in the land grab following the war.

In Benson’s sensitive and pared-down staging, the characters are finely rendered and keenly individualized. Sissie, the flighty, perky sibling, retreats into deliberate dimness whenever adult responsibility beckons. The family rebel, who eloped against her father’s wishes, the impoverished Grace Anne carefully nurses her sense of rejection and injury. But, in Rose’s superbly calibrated performance, it is Cornelia who comes across as the subtlest and most sympathetic of the three. The manager of her family’s estate, Cornelia is condemned by her very level-headedness to a life of onerous duty, stoically shouldering the burden of her father’s legacy at a terrible cost to herself.

These three sisters, each hemmed in by gender and circumstance and family expectation, are potentially Chekhovian in stature.

However, by confining his sweeping subject matter to monologues with little interaction, Foote reduces the epic possibilities to prosy reader’s theater, satisfying in itself but a lace-edged silhouette of what might have been.

Deceptively simple at first glance, Angela Balogh Calin’s set, beautifully lighted by Paulie Jenkins, features a bright blank upstage wall that gradually transforms to a panoramic view of vast cotton fields, suffused with the colors of a Texas sunset.

It’s a lovely visual metaphor for the vanishing way of life that Foote continues, heroically and prolifically, to chronicle.

*

‘The Carpetbagger’s Children’

Where: South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:45 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 16

Price: $27-$54

Contact: (714) 708-5555

Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes