A master with class

When fledgling director Cameron Watson set out to stage Horton Foote’s “The Habitation of Dragons,” he was eager to get it right.

So he called the playwright.

Fast-forward to a recent spring morning at Actors Co-op’s 99-seat Crossley Terrace Theatre in Hollywood. Courtly and affable, Foote is in the house, flanked by Watson and rapt theater company members.

Foote, 89, may not have acquired the legendary sheen of his late contemporary Arthur Miller, but he is one of the American theater’s indelible figures, earning such accolades over his still active, seven-decade career as the Pulitzer Prize (“The Young Man From Atlanta”), two Academy Awards (“Tender Mercies” and the screen adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird”) and the National Medal of Arts.

Watson and Foote aren’t strangers. Their lives have intersected professionally, off and on, for years.

“I gave you, I guess, your first job in New York,” says Foote in his gentle South Texas cadence, after he and Watson settle onstage in old-fashioned chairs on the play’s 1930s-era set.

“You sure did. My first professional job.” Watson beams.

That job was as Matthew Broderick’s replacement in the 1987 off-Broadway production of “The Widow Claire.” Foote chose the then-young acting hopeful to play opposite his daughter, actress Hallie Foote.

Watson, 43, had the “fresh from the country” look that was just right for the part, Foote observes. “We’d seen practically everybody in New York. The minute I saw him, I knew.”

Later, as an actor in Los Angeles, Watson appeared in Foote plays staged by director and Foote scholar Crystal Brian: “The Habitation of Dragons” and “Laura Dennis” at Hollywood’s Zephyr Theatre and the first fully professional production of “The Day Emily Got Married,” presented by Lost World Theatre in 2000. Last year, at Foote’s request, Watson joined Hallie Foote, Estelle Parsons and others in a panel discussion and play readings at the first annual Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival at Baylor University in Texas.

When Watson called to talk about “Dragons,” “we were right on the same page,” Foote says. In the play, Foote returns to his familiar landscape -- Harrison, Texas -- where personal tragedy brings about the fall of a prideful 1930s lawyer and the revelation of painful family secrets.

Foote thinks it may be his “most overt use of the theme of forgiveness,” adding that he still grieves for the small-town characters that he put through tragedies of biblical proportions before they come to hope and redemption.

“It’s pitiful, isn’t it?” he says, eyes compassionate under snowy brows. “Whenever I see it, I get all upset again.”

Watson tells him that audiences at the Crossley always respond to the “powerful moment when the truth is finally spoken and you realize what these lives could have been if [it] had been spoken at an earlier time.”

Foote will attend the production the following Sunday.

Is Watson nervous?

A grinning Foote beats Watson to the punch: “No, he’s not nervous.” Watson breaks up.

Foote is an attentive listener. That’s how he primed his creative pump, hearing yarns spun by generations of relatives as he grew up in Wharton, Texas, the thinly disguised locale of many of his plays.

But Watson would clearly rather listen to Foote, who responds to his youthful colleague’s near-reverent regard with fatherly warmth during conversational tour stops through a life in theater that began when the playwright was an actor in his teens.

It was Agnes de Mille who encouraged him to write, Foote recalls, and “Noel Coward was doing it, so I thought that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write myself a play.”

Drawing on his own life for his plays, he learned an early lesson when reports filtered home: “Don’t use real names.”

His career shift was assured, he says, when theater critic Brook Atkinson praised one of Foote’s early efforts, while panning the young playwright’s performance in it. His firsthand experience, however, left him with a lasting respect for actors. “They give their lives to their professions, and so few are really rewarded in conventional ways.”

Watson confides that his own shift from acting to directing, which includes an upcoming independent film set in his Tennessee hometown, has left him wanting to do more of the same. Foote nods.

“You like being Papa,” he says.

“I like being Papa,” Watson admits, laughing.

The subject turns to writing regimens. “Is there a time of day that you write better than not?” Watson asks.

“No, I can go anytime I’m ready to go,” Foote tells him. “That’s the trouble; I can’t quit. I woke up last night about 1:30 and I just had to get up and write. It’s compulsive.”

He’s putting the finishing touches on his first screenplay in years, a TV movie set in Durham, N.C., and will resume work on a new play, “The Tax Assessor.” He’s holding on to three completed works, “as long as certain people are with us. I don’t ever want to embarrass anybody.”

Foote still writes in longhand, although he’s sheepish about owning two computers that he doesn’t know how to use. “I really have got to face that in my lifetime,” he says, to appreciative laughter. “I can’t be that ignorant. I mean, it’s just frightening when 5-year-old children can do what I can’t do.”

After more than an hour, the lights onstage are warm. Foote is tiring but unfailingly gracious as he joins the eager company members for a quick reception before Watson drives him back to his daughter’s Pacific Palisades home, where he is staying.

A week later, speaking by phone, Foote offers his reaction to Watson’s staging of his play.

“I was nervous because I knew that everybody in the cast would be wanting to hear my reaction, and there’s nothing worse than that kind of forced thing you sometimes have to say,” he says. “But I really was moved.”

*

‘The Habitation of Dragons’

Where: Crossley Terrace Theatre, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday; after June 5, 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: June 19

Price: $22

Contact: (323) 462-8460