Katie Bell I love Horton Foote’s writing. I recognize that his scripts won’t ever be confused with Quentin Tarantino’s; indeed, if there is a swear word in any of his plays, you can bet it’s followed by an apt rejoinder from the scandalized local fussbudget and quickly forgotten. Foote’s plays and movies take their time to pull you in and work their magic, but work their magicthey do, granting star status to the passions and dreams and frustrations of actual American people who have never cruised the San Diego Freeway.
Like many of his plays, Foote’s “Talking Pictures” is set in the fictional town of Harrison, Texas, during a time of transition. Harrison has a lot in common with Brian Friel’s Ballybeg: It’s a point of return, a touchstone, a field of the imagination on which an author has played out all his fancies. Nothing happens and everything happens, usually within the span of a few days. Foote is congenitally more upbeat than Friel, but isn’t that the American virus?
“Talking Pictures” is set in 1929, when silent movies are about to give over in a big way to talkies and the change is generating an almost sexual anticipation in small towns like Harrison. The only resident who will be adversely affected is Myra Tolliver (Hallie Foote), divorced mother of 14 -year-old Pete (Eddie Kaye Thomas) who’s struggling to make ends meet by playing piano at the local movie theater; the coming change will put her out of a job.
Myra and Pete board in the home of the Jacksons (Frank Girardeau and Alice McLane), upstanding working-class Methodists with a pair of daughters — Katie Bell (Samantha Reynolds) is hooked on Hollywood and Vesta (Sarah Paulson) is a snob in the making.
Myra is being courted by Willis (Seth Jones, who has the haunted, shadow-darkened face of a Steinbeck hero), a bricklayer abandoned five years earlier by an inconstant wife. And both Katie Bell and her mother are enchanted by Estaquio Trevino (Isaiah G. Cazares), a Mexican emigre hoping to follow in his preacher father’s footsteps; to them he is exotic, and Estaquio is too sweet or too sly to acknowledge the poisoning racism around him.
“Talking Pictures” is essentially the story of Myra and Willis, and things work out well. But it’s also about an era in which regular people wonder why popular entertainers put on black face, why anyone would ever make a movie with an unhappy ending, and most of all why anyone would ever leave the ones who loved them.
Hallie Foote is endlessly touching in a role she could easily walk through, and Jones’ Willis is earnestness embodied. Susan Wands is quite perfect as Willis’ pouty gold-digger wife, Gladys.
This is the first entry in a season devoted by the Signature Theater Company to Foote’s plays (as past seasons have focused on Romulus Linney, Lee Blessing and Edward Albee). The production is bare bones, and Carol Goodheart’s staging is elementary. The play is a treasure.
