Dividing the Estate

The eternally spry Horton Foote does a nimble Texas two-step in Dividing the Estate. Half the play is a leisurely, courtly, astutely observed portrait of cultural and generational change; the other half is a quick, lively comedy of manners and manors in decline. It is 1987 in the fictional Lone Star town of Harrison. Property values are plummeting, and other values—morality, family, honor, thrift—are spiraling downward as well. Foote takes the long, Chekhovian view of all of this, allowing for eloquent laments about a lost gentility but also for skepticism about the origins and veracity of that nostalgic past.

Dividing the Estate made its New York debut last year at Primary Stages. I enjoyed that production very much, and was surprised to find that, months later, its characters and conflicts lingered strongly in my mind. Michael Wilson’s expert production has now moved to Broadway with its very fine 13-member cast intact. Elizabeth Ashley, smokily staunch, plays the matriarch of a crumbling family, who stubbornly refuses to divvy up the family lands; Penny Fuller, Gerald McRaney and Hallie Foote play her children. This latter Foote—a specialist in her father’s work—pickpocketed the show Off Broadway as the tense and greedy Mary Jo, and now openly mugs it; she is so vital that she tips the play’s balance in the direction of laughter. But why complain? Foote is giving the comic performance of the season: a lethally funny depiction of a woman in a frenzy of financial entitlement, struck to the heart by cupidity’s arrow.