Ghosts Walk in Appalachia

By T.E. Kalem

FOXFIRE by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn

Time present and time past. Both are vividly evoked in diametrically opposed plays now running in New York City theaters. David Mamet's Edmond gazes hypnotically into the bubbling cauldron of the modern urban inferno. All egos are rampant, all values degraded, all souls for sale, all hope abandoned. Hell on the installment plan.

But the U.S. is a contradictory nation, a place of displaced memories. Outpacing time and history in a willful torrent of assumed progress, the American forgets that his country was founded as the New Jerusalem. Only when some isolated pocket of that dream manages to elude skeptic scoffing does the past reduce the present to tears and wonder.

That may be too lofty a plane on which to place Foxfire. If so, it is an error on the side of the angels. What is being struck on the stage of Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theater is the rarely heard chord of all-embracing humanity. This play quivers with laughter and stabs the heart. It speaks for things too long mute: love of the land (in this case, Southern Appalachia), the inviolability of the family, the rigorous ethic of hard work and the rebuke and solace of an omnipresent God. To think of that as a didactic, neo-conservative agenda is to miss the tone and temper of the work. Foxfire has already been called a "hillbilly Our Town," which is close to the mark. And even those with less than a lifetime's acquaintance with the work of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy must know that this pair could strike songs from stones.

The set is beatific. Designer David Mitchell has conjured up an image of ineffable peace, a smoky blue-green mountain solitude in Rabun County, Ga. As weathered as the clapboards on her home, Annie Nations (Tandy), 79, lives here alone.

And yet not alone. By force of will and imagination, Annie has kept her husband Hector (Cronyn) around for company.

Dead some five years, he is a most corporeal and cantankerous ghost. Hector has not gone gently into the eternal night. He says at one point: "I'm gonna live jus' as long as I see anybody else alivin'."

In flashbacks, the two re-create some of the central experiences of a 63-year life together-- courtship, childbirth, child rearing, physical decline, death -- the homely parabola of existence. Their youngest son Dillard (Keith Carradine) appears. He is a country-music star whose wife has walked out, leaving their two small children with him. He describes her as "the fastest credit card in the South." Dillard asks his mother if she always loved his father. Her flash answer epitomizes the play's categorical imperative: "We was married!" Duty omnia vincit. But after a pause, her further answer shows why the play wins us through the generosity of truth: "No. Not always. I guess sometimes I near hated him."

Carradine not only has an ingratiating singing voice, but brings poignance to the unintended rupture of father and son. For Hector, Dillard's preference for guitar playing to farming the land of his daddy and granddaddy is a betrayal, a pain oddly mixed with pride. The old man's reaction is akin to the feelings of an immigrant father who sends a son to college to learn a language and a culture that the two may never share. This blood gap has never been treated more sensitively in an American play.

When it comes to the acting splendor of Tandy and Cronyn, Descartes might say, they act, therefore they are. They bring age to glory and glory to age.

--By T.E. Kalem

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