The Roads To Home

The Roads To Home is playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre located at 38 Commerce Theatre. It runs two hours and ten minutes with one intermission. The play closes on November 27, 2016.

Horton Foote was an American playwright and screen writer. He is known for his screenplay To Kill a Mockingbird. It won an Academy Award. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955 for the play “The Young Man from Atlanta”. Horton also wrote The Trip to Bountiful.

Hallie Foote is the daughter of the playwright. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009 for Dividing the Estate. Hallie was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 1995 for The Horton Foote Plays.

Deron Abner is married to Hallie Foote. He was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for The Trip to Bountiful in 2013

Harriet Harris won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award in 2002 for Thoroughly Modern Millie. She is known for her role “Felick Tilman” in Desperate House Wives.

Michael Wilson is the director. He won a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Circle Critics Award in 2010 for The Orphans Home Cycle.

David C. Woolard is the costume designer. He was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 2014 for The Heir Apparent, a Tony Award in 2001 for The Rocky Horror Show and 1993 for The Who’s Tommy.

Act One is called “A Nightingale”. It takes place in the home of Jack and Mabel Votaugh home in early April 1924.

Mabel (Hallie Foote) is talking to her neighbor and friend Vonnie Hayhurst (Harriet Harris) in her kitchen. Vonnie has come back from vacation. She went without her husband Eddie (Matt Sullivan).

Mabel tells her about this woman who keeps visiting her. Annie Gayle Long (Rebecca Brooksher) grew up in there town. Her father was President of a bank in town. He was killed in front of her, by a client he foreclosed on his home. She shows up when Vonnie is there. It appears there is something wrong mentally with her. Jack (Devon Abner) has called her husband Mr. Long (Dan Bittner) to keep her away. Mr. Long comes to get her. He persuades her to leave but she comes back saying she left her children, which she hasn’t.

Scene 2 “ The Dearest Friend” takes place six months later in Mabel’s living. Mabel’s husband Jack is asleep in a chair. She keeps telling him to go to bed. He said he will go to bed at 10. Mabel tells Jack Annie committed to a sanatorium. Vonnie comes in upset. Her husband is having an affair and wants a divorce. She sure it’s the women the met on the train to Harrison. Jack learned about the affair two days earlier but would not give the details. Vonnie said she would not give him a divorce.

Act 2 “Spring Dance” is in a garden outside of the auditorium in Austin Texas, four years later.

Annie is still in the asylum. She is dressed beautifully. The person she is talking to Dave Dushan is not responding to her. They are from the same town. He hands her a letter from his mother that details the town gossip.

All the men are dressed in tuxedoes. Each one is not well mentally. They change their stories as to how long they have been there, when they were etc.

In the four years Annie has been there, her husband divorced her and remarried. Her mother has custody of her children. She remembers the real world once in a while.

This is a beautiful story of a woman who comes back to the town she grew up in. But by doing so the memories she repressed come back to destroy her. All of the women she meets have their own problems.

The cast does an outstanding job especially in the second act.

Rebecca Brooksher does a remarkable job.

Review by Rozanna Radakovich.

Photos by Annazor.

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