Theatre in Review: Him (Primary Stages/59E59)

	Tim Hopper. Photo: James Leynse

You could probably write a master's thesis on the ways in which the plays of Daisy Foote resemble, and differ from, those of her father, Horton, but, five minutes into Him, it is clear that both are poets of fecklessness and loss. Whether Daisy has mastered her father's knack for compact storytelling is another question. Father-daughter comparisons might seem unfair -- it's not Daisy Foote's fault that Horton Foote was one of the great American playwrights -- but given Primary Stages' marketing of Him as part of its "celebration of the Foote family legacy," it seems the company is all but begging for such comparisons to be made.

The "him" of the title is an elderly New England storekeeper who is quietly dying in an upstairs bedroom. Downstairs, in the kitchen, his middle-aged children are facing ruin. The family business is all but bankrupt, by the Shop-Rites and Walmarts that have sprung up in the area. Pauline, the daughter, notes in a tone of controlled panic that all day they have had exactly one customer -- to whom she sold a carton of milk that was two weeks past its sell-by date. Henry, Pauline's brother, also sees disaster looming, but he prefers to spin romantic fantasies about a married male neighbor. Adding to their burden is their brother Farley, who is mentally challenged and extremely obstreperous; among other things, he has been caught in flagrante delicto with the similarly disabled young lady who lives next door. As Pauline glumly notes, the worst part of this tiny scandal is the fact that Farley is the only one of them in a relationship.

Up to this point, Him can be enjoyed for the brevity and skill with which Daisy Foote sketches in her setup, and for her ability to suggest the presence of the surrounding community, a trait she surely learned at her father's knee. Even better, she tosses an elegant curveball into the plot when the old man dies, leaving Pauline and Henry unexpectedly in ownership of hundreds of acres of prime real estate. This stunning legacy comes accompanied by a journal that extends to several dozen volumes, the contents of which make clear that their father was effectively a total stranger to them. These revelations have strikingly different effects on Pauline and Henry. Pauline discovers that she quite likes being a ruthless businesswoman while Henry spins into depression, unable to square the almost Emersonian figure in the journals with the silent tyrant who blighted their lives.

Him is plotted with a finely honed sense of irony, but the effect is blunted by a set of characters so thinly conceived that it is nearly impossible to care what happens to them. "We barely exist," one of them says early on, and I couldn't agree more. We're meant to believe that Pauline and Henry were so dominated by their father that they simply threw in the towel and returned home, sitting out their lives for decades and dwelling ever after in his shadow, but exactly why this should be so, Foote never says. (Many people with monstrous parents flee at the first possible opportunity; it's the playwright's business to make us see why one choice is made over the other.) What little information we are offered hardly satisfies: Pauline had a baby, out of wedlock, who promptly died; she dreams every night about the lost child. Henry apparently had his spirit crushed in college at the hands of gay-baiting students, but the details are never revealed.

Even more puzzling is the fact that Pauline and Henry know so little about their parents. They are surprisingly vague about the existence of any relatives and are remarkably ignorant of their father's business dealings. (Their late mother -- whom the author barely bothers with -- knew about at least one major land purchase, but remained silent about it, for reasons that remain unclear.) Strangest of all, we learn how their father spent hours of solitude in the nearby wilderness; why did they never notice his absences? How did a man who ran a store all day long find time to sneak off into the forest and have writerly epiphanies about nature, life, and death? In the author's most unusual gambit, every so often the lights go down and one or more of the characters mouths passages from the diary; thanks to this approach, the father, whom we never see, is the most interesting person in Him.

The production benefits from the contributions of a number of solid theatre pros, beginning with the director, Evan Yionoulis, whose subtle staging tells us much about the family's changing fortunes. (In Act I, when one of the characters reaches for a box of breakfast cereal, it's a generic box of Raisin Bran; in Act II, the cupboard is opened to reveal a big box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, a sure sign that money is no longer an object in this household.) If a New England accent doesn't fit Hallie Foote as well as a Texas drawl, she nevertheless has many amusing moments as Pauline, whether she is terrorizing Farley's pregnant wife with stories of what happens to babies in kiddie pools, or, when planning to cover the countryside with pricey new homes, announcing that some of them have "solar panels for the person who is into the green sort of thing." Tim Hopper has the right sad-sack quality as Henry, although he is hampered by the author's tendency to telegraph the character's fate -- he pops pills and has dizzy spells -- a strategy that robs Act II of much suspense. Adam LeFevre's Farley may be the least sentimentally conceived portrait of a mentally disabled adult I've ever seen, a tribute to the author's bracing honesty. Adina Verson makes a striking debut as Farley's girlfriend and, later, wife, who thinks pregnancy is a lark until Pauline fills her in on the details of labor and birth.

Also proving helpful are Marion Williams' intentionally drab kitchen setting, Tyler Micoleau's elegant lighting, Teresa Snider-Stein's character-specific costumes, and the original music and sound by Broken Chord.

But where Horton Foote always had the ability to conjure up an entire society with a few well-chosen details, Daisy Foote has yet to master this minimalist approach. Him is a drama with good bones, but it needs some meat on them.--David Barbour