Horton Foote - a Texas Writer of note!

In the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, there is a several week celebration of the Texas-born write, Horton Foote. For information on the festival, go here.

Famous as a screenwriter -- "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Tender Mercies" perhaps best-known, he is a prolific writer of plays as well. My wife Sylvia and I have enjoyed his work for some time, and find in it a particular echo of the life along the Coastal Bend of Texas. (He being from Wharton, we having lived in the Victoria area long enough for both of our children to be born there.)

This Spring, we have seen three plays so far: "Talking Pictures," "Dividing the Estate," and "The Traveling Lady," and have a few more scheduled.
We also are re-watching some of his films: "Tender Mercies" last week and "1918" last night (in which you can see a very young Matthew Broderick act the heck out of a relatively small role).

There are no car-chases or space-battles, but his works are nice tales of life's challenges to everyday folks, and the crises they find themselves in because of forces often beyond their control -- addiction, cycles of abuse, war, disease, technological change, and just living with other people.

A couple of observations:
1) He often has single mothers as major characters. That is not the normal view of households in the time periods he most often writes of. It is interesting to see the unique challenges such women faced in the society of their times -- especially since I am the child of a most-of-the-time single mother.
2) Religion plays both as almost constant background and in a vital role in his works -- people expect folks to be in church on Sunday, hymns are in the air and in the minds of folks all week, God intervenes in the day-to-day in weal and woe and people interact in thanks and complaint, neighbors share their opinions but also reflect on the biblical witness and church teachings.
Maybe I miss that tone to life, as it too permeated at least my earliest life in Texas.

Don't get me wrong, I like car-chases and space-battles in my movies; I appreciate the technological changes in life for the most part, but every now and then I enjoy a return to another time -- and Horton Foote is a good writer to take you there.