Orphans' home

the long version

"By critical consensus, Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle - a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays that traces the transformation over twenty-six years of a small-town Southern orphan, Horace Robedaux, into a husband, father, and patriarch. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Foote, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal ouevre, but also in the canon of American drama." "Porter shows how the small-town Southern culture speaks through Horace as his life story unfolds while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation. She explains that Foote's signature style - which replaces stage directions, poetic language, and suspense-driven narratives with sparse, restrained dialogue and seemingly actionless plots - creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. Similarly, Foote uses recurring character types and motifs, interrelated images and symbols, and parallel and inverted events that reverberate within and among the plays, employing language and structure in innovative ways. In comparing the cycle with the works of Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of Southern literature and American drama."--Jacket.