Horton Foote’s typically graceful hand at depicting small-town life and family squabbles in plays such as “The Trip to Bountiful” goes into unpleasant — if occasionally quite funny — overdrive in “The Old Friends,” now at Raven Theatre in a Midwest premiere directed by Michael Menendian. Foote, who died in 2009, first worked on this play in the mid-1960s, though it wasn’t fully produced until its 2013 New York premiere.
There is a creakiness in the joints here — as if the play itself resisted being pulled out of mothballs. And though Chekhovian elements pop up (a gun is at least mentioned in the first act, so you know what will happen in the second), as well as strong echoes of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” the overall effect is more farcical “Mama’s Family” than Southern gothic melodrama.
Marssie Mencotti is the mama here — Mamie Borden, , an old woman stuck living with her hard-partying daughter, Julia Price (Judy Lea Steele) and her choleric son-in-law, Albert (Ron Quade) in Harrison, Texas. The sleepy agricultural town has exploded with wealth, and the Prices have it. Though not as much as Gertrude Ratliff (JoAnn Montemurro), a dipsomaniacal widow with designs on her brother-in-law, Howard (Will Casey), who runs her many properties for her.
The arrival of Sybil Borden (Lori Myers), the widow of Mamie’s ne’er-quite-did-well-enough son and onetime paramour of Howard, throws everything into a tizzy. Toss in Tom Underwood (Andy Monson), a young bounder who catches the eyes of both Julia and Gertrude, and the set-ups are in place for greed and jealousy to run rampant while the drinks flow freely.
The problem isn’t that these characters are unpleasant — though they mostly are. The problem is that their unpleasantness is so predictable. Casey’s Howard and Myers’ bookish, Pablo Neruda-quoting Sybil carry the emotional core of the play, and they deliver as the battered-but-decent souls beset on all sides by pettiness. There is a hint of broader social changes afoot when a character observes that the local junior college is now filled with students who would have been farm workers 25 years earlier. It’s a pity that Foote didn’t delve deeper into those changes to give a larger context for the conflicts here.
Taking the volume down a couple of notches — especially with Montemurro and Steele — would also help balance the scales between monstrous self-absorption and midlife loneliness. Montemurro’s not-so-merry-widow wakes up after a bender and observes that her bedroom feels like a coffin. But we don’t get enough chances to glimpse the pathetic need amid the greed.
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As with most Raven productions, it looks great. Jeffrey D. Kmiec’s reversible set, filled with mid-century modern furnishings and nouveaux-riche pretensions (except for Sybil’s humble home), captures the keeping-up-appearances casual gaucheries of Gertrude’s life in particular. Designer kClare McKellaston’s costumes also suggests Julia’s cougar tendencies and Gertrude’s need to dominate with diamonds. But ultimately, “The Old Friends” feel like cardboard cut-outs rather than the fully fleshed-out characters one usually finds with the best of Foote.
REVIEW: “The Old Friends”
2 STARS
Through March 26, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.; $39-$42 at 773-338-2177 or raventheatre.com.
Kerry Reid is a freelance critic.