Edition: U.S. / Global

THEATER REVIEW; The Suffocating Dust in a Household's Cozy Clutter

Published: August 6, 2004

Though it's a scorcher of a summer in Harrison, Tex., Lyd Davis cannot stop feeling cold. Portrayed with nerve-twanging fretfulness by Estelle Parsons in ''The Day Emily Married,'' the sad and funny play by Horton Foote that opened last night at the 59E59 Theaters, Lyd swaddles herself in shawls, closes windows and shuts off fans while her family swelters around her.

The doctors can't figure out what's wrong with Lyd, but anyone familiar with Mr. Foote's work should be able to come up with an accurate diagnosis: Lyd has caught the chill of discovering that you are born to live and die lonely, no matter how many people you have around you. And it's an affliction that everyone in Mr. Foote's plays is going to come down with sooner or later.

For more than half a century, Mr. Foote, now 88, has spun a series of hypnotically heartbroken tales for the stage about the residents of Harrison, a small town where knowing everybody who lives there -- and all their secret soap operas -- is no guarantee against solitude. Sweet, salty and curiously addictive, Mr. Foote's plays unfold with the soft-voiced, chattering ease of gossip over coffee on the front porch.

But if Harrison's stories of wrecked marriages, closet vices and family feuds give it a surface resemblance to Peyton Place, it also has a fair amount in common with the blasted heath of ''King Lear'' and the arid fields of Samuel Beckett's tramps. The author of the resonantly named ''Orphans' Home'' cycle of plays and the Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Young Man From Atlanta,'' Mr. Foote is a master of the distinctive art of balancing everyday domestic clutter over a pit of existential darkness.

In its first act in particular, ''The Day Emily Married,'' directed by Michael Wilson, pulls off this balancing act with a lovely understated assurance. Jeff Cowie's set precisely evokes a snug, floral-patterned home that has probably looked the way it does for decades. But the sounds and lights of passing cars suggest encroaching modernity. And you immediately sense the strain amid the cozy, deadpan politeness of the folks who live there.

The actress portraying the title character is invaluable in establishing and sustaining this double-edged tone. That's Hallie Foote, the playwright's daughter and a peerless interpreter of her father's work. Both courteous and brisk in manner, Ms. Foote's Emily is the seemingly dutiful 38-year-old daughter of septuagenarian parents (Ms. Parsons and the wonderful William Biff McGuire).

Emily is indeed about to be married when the play begins, and she is determined not to let her parents talk her and her new husband, the strappingly ambitious Richard Murray (James Colby), into living with them. Emily tried that before, disastrously, with her first husband. But once you meet Ms. Parsons's Lyd, an expert in emotional blackmail, it pretty much goes without saying that Emily will not be allowed to have her own way.

As is always true of Mr. Foote's work, what keeps you watching lies less in what happens than in how his characters try and fail to prevent the inevitable, a tension that operates on levels big and small. It infuses Lyd's time-defying rouged cheeks and dyed hair, still frozen in a flapper's spit curls, and Emily's small, hopeful attempts at changing the décor in her parents' house.

Watching the seemingly frivolous sparring among these characters, you experience the discomfort of being a guest at another family's dinner table, when you suddenly sense barbs beneath coded banter. And a running, teasing battle between mother and daughter over a wall of family photographs turns out to have shattering consequences.

The play's second act tips into overstatement and melodrama, with a series of confrontations that spell out what has always been implicit. The layered passive aggression of the earlier scenes is far more compelling than the balder moments of self-revelation. But the performers -- and that includes Mr. Colby, who has to turn into an unmitigated cad -- never betray their characters.

Even at its most forced, ''The Day Emily Married'' emanates an infectious, eerily familiar melancholy that keeps pricking at the memory like a wandering melody. I can think of no other playwright who is as harsh in his sentimentality as Mr. Foote is. His plays may radiate the burnished nostalgia of sepia-tone photographs, but he insists on your feeling that there is more ice than fire in their glow.


By Horton Foote; directed by Michael Wilson; sets by Jeff Cowie; costumes by David C. Woolard; lighting by Rui Rita; original music and sound by Andre Pluess; prop master, Laurie Marvald; production stage manager, Karyn Meek; assistant stage manager, Jerry Dee Lame. Presented by Primary Stages, Casey Childs, executive producer; Andrew Leynse, artistic director. At 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Estelle Parsons (Lyd Davis), William Biff McGuire (Lee Davis), Hallie Foote (Emily), James Colby (Richard Murray), Teri Keane (Alma Nash), Delores Mitchell (Addie) and Pamela Payton-Wright (Maud Cleveland).

Photo: Estelle Parsons, left, as Lyd, and Hallie Foote as her daughter, Emily, in Horton Foote's play ''The Day Emily Married,'' at 59E59 Theaters. (Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)