Coverage and Information
How Dallas’ Theaters Came Together To Celebrate Texas Legend Horton Foote: Read More
A Roundtable With Horton Foote’s Children Kicks Off the Festival: Read More
Buy a Festival Pass: Visit Here
The Performances
Talking Pictures
The year is 1929. The divorced Myra Tolliver of Harrison, TX (a fictional town near the Gulf) makes her living playing the piano to accompany silent films, but everything about her life is about to change. This small-scale play, Stage West’s entry into the Horton Foote Festival, was produced off off Broadway in 1994 with great success. The Times critic states, “As the play’s first-act curtain must be one of the funniest things Mr. Foote has ever written, the end must be one of the most moving.” Cue our excitement and intrigue over what the Fort Worth indie theater company will do with this kind of material. Written in 1988
Mar 10 2011 – Apr 3 2011: Thursdays 7:30; Fridays & Saturdays 8:00;
Sundays 3:00.Location: Stage West
Reviews: FrontRow; Dallas Morning News; Theater Jones; Star-Telegram
Dividing The Estate
We’ve all seen what happens when a clan of country bumpkins strikes it rich with oil (courtesy of The Beverly Hillbillies), but what goes down when the opposite occurs? When a wealthy, established oil family begins to see their estate crumble to pieces? That’s the story told in Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, produced by the Dallas Theater Center, in which the powerful Gordon family starts hemorrhaging money in the wake of the 1980s oil bust. Watch as each Gordon struggles as the entitlement and luxury they’ve long taken for granted is swept away in a play that provides both laughs and a serious look at American culture.
March 11 – April 9: Tuesday – Thursday, 7:30; Fridays, 8:00; Saturday-Sunday, 2:00
Location: Wyly Theater
Reviews: FrontRow; Theater Jones; Dallas Observer; Dallas Morning News
The Old Beginning, John Turner Davis
These two one-act plays are presented by First United Methodist Church of Dallas. The Old Beginning looks at the struggle between a father and a son as the younger man tries breaks with tradition. John Turner Davis is the story of a young boy abandoned by his family who must find his own place to belong.
March 25-April 2: Thursday-Saturday, 7;30
Location: First United Methodist Church of Dallas
Reviews: FrontRow, Theater Jones
Three Readings: A Nightingale, The Dancers, The Land of the Astronauts
What distinguishes this reading of three of Horton Foote’s one act plays by Flower Mound Performing Arts Theater is that the actors will invite members of the audience to join actors, directors, and students on stage to participate in the reading and discussion.
March 27, April 3, and April 10, 7:30
Location: Flower Mound Performing Arts Theater
3 FOOTE: An Evening of Three One-Act Plays
It almost reads like a riddle: How many actors does it take to perform a trio of plays by the same legendary playwright?
If Kitchen Dog Theater can provide any clues, it’s somewhere around five. KDT is using a small ensemble of actors for three of Horton Foote’s most popular one-acts, starting with Blind Date, and followed by The Man Who Climbed Pecan Trees and One Armed Man.
April 1 – April 30: Wednesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m.
Location: Kitchen Dog Theatre
The Young Man From Atlanta
The Uptown Players will present Horton Foote’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story about Will Kidder as part of the DFW Foote Festival. Kidder, who’s worked for the same grocery wholesaler for more than 40 years, is laid off and left to change his career late in life. Having given his wife, Lily, a $5,000 check each Christmas for the past 15 years, Kidder plans to use that money to start his own business. But a problem arises when Kidder discovers that Lily has given much of the cash to their deceased son’s roommate, a young man from Atlanta. Armed with few dollars and fewer job prospects, Kidder is forced to ponder a once-bright future that has turned bleak in a matter of days.
April 1 – 17: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. (no performance April 3)
Location: Kalita Humphreys Theater
The Traveling Lady
Presented by WaterTower Theatre, The Traveling Lady is Horton Foote’s tale of a married woman who patiently awaits her husband’s release from a small-town Texas prison. As his sentences draws to a close, she has travel to the jail to pick him up, but the trip there gives her plenty of time to contemplate her relationship and her expectations of love.
April 4 – May 1: Wednesday-Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.
Location: Addison Theatre Center
The Roads Home
A master of the short form, playwright Horton Foote wrote these three separate one-acts intended to be performed together in one performance. The plays center on three women whose small Texas town values ill-equip them for the tough city lives they are now leading. A Theater Three production.
April 7 – May 7: Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Location: Theatre Three
A Two Day Staged Reading of The Carpetbagger’s Children
Wingspan Theatre Company visits Horton Foote’s favorite fictional town of Harrison, TX. The elderly remaining Thompson sisters look after the 20,000 acre family plantation that their father, a Union Army soldier turned as a carpetbagger, amassed after the war.
April 8-9: 1:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Location: Bath House Cultural Center
A Trip to Bountiful
Moving past her autumn years, Carrie Page is an aging Houston woman who has a yearning to visit her hometown of Bountiful, Texas. But no matter how many times she tries to go, she’s stopped by her well-meaning but overbearing son and daughter-in-law, who both fear that letting her travel alone could be dangerous. Carrie finally manages to sneak away undetected and board a bus to Bountiful, but she can only hope her childhood city is still just as beautiful as she remembers it. Contemporary Theatre of Dallas presents one of Foote’s most loved plays, directed by René Moreno.
April 8-May 1: Thursday, 7:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday: 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. (no performance April 24)
Location: Contemporary Theatre of Dallas
Courtship, The Young Lady of Property, The Dancers
The students of Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts have selected three one-acts (Courtship, the Dancers, and the Young Lady of Property) that exemplify Foote’s love and respect for his own past and the journey of self-discovery each of us must make out of adolescence and into the knowledge and understanding of our place in the world.
April 13 – 15; 20 – 21: 7 p.m.
Location: Booker T. Washington: Black Box Theater
Other Festival Events
Life and Work of Horton Foote: An Exhibition
In celebration of Horton Foote’s life and career, Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library is displaying six decades worth of his personal papers, writings, photographs, letters, programs, and posters. In addition, the library will publish a memorial volume that will include contributions from Foote’s colleagues and friends.
Movie Screening: To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the great American novels of the 20th century. Lee won a Pulitzer for her 1960 novel, and the book soon after spawned a Hollywood adaptation starring Gregory Peck that was nominated for eight Oscars, including one for best adapted screenplay. The author (and winner of that particular Oscar) was none other than Texas’ own Horton Foote. Watch the movie on the big screen with Gary Cogill, who prior to his current stint as a producer, was WFAA’s film for 25 years.
March 17, 7:30 p.m.
Location: Studio Movie Grill
Horton Foote: Memories, Readings & Recollections
Part of both the Dallas Museum of Arts’s Arts & Letters Live series and the Horton Foote Festival, this informal conversaton will feature Hallie Foote, actress and Horton Foote’s daughter, Wilborn Hampton, New York Times theater critic and author of Foote’s biography, and Tess Harper, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in Tender Mercies. Kevin Moriarty, artistic director of the Dallas Theatre Center, will moderate.
April 4: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Dallas Museum of Art
KERA TV: A Special Evening of Horton Foote Programming
Details: TBD. Stay tuned.
Synopses by Liz Johnson
