Revisiting Jane Pittman

Where to start, Lena? Where to start?

Even before she won the Tony Award on Sunday, my friends and I were looking forward to seeing Cicely Tyson on Broadway in Horton Foote’s play The Trip to Bountiful. Ms. Tyson’s stage appearances are exceedingly rare — indeed, when I saw a poster for the show, I supposed that it was a made-for-TV adaptation on a cable network. That in itself would have been something, but the reality is that, on Sunday afternoon, I will be sitting in a room with Cicely Tyson herself, and she will be doing what she does better than just about anybody else who ever drew breath: acting.

In anticipation, my friends and I took a look at the film that pretty much sealed Ms. Tyson’s destiny, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, from 1974.* She had already won an Oscar nomination for Sounder, which I’d seen during its initial release, in 1972. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I’d seen her even earlier, in a guest appearance on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, which tweaked the audience’s racial consciousness by presenting her as a potential love interest for Bill Bixby, who was white. In the context of a sitcom geared mainly to children, that was a form of consciousness-raising, and pretty daring. But it’s really from Miss Jane Pittman onward that it seems most clear that Ms. Tyson was not going to squander her gifts in the service of piffle.

Shortly after winning the Tony Award on Sunday night.

It’s true that not many other name actresses could have played such roles as Harriet Tubman and Coretta Scott King, and fewer still could have played them as well as Ms. Tyson did. But, give or take the occasional “Coffee Achievers” commercial on TV, she seems to have made a decision to take on projects that mattered, and especially those that spoke to the experience of black people in America. In so doing, she helped other Americans to understand that experience.

And so she was Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in Roots — not a big role, but an important one. Even more recently, in The Help, while playing what might look like a stereotypical “maid” role, she revealed the precarity of a woman’s position in a hierarchy that’s based not only on race but also economics, where personal relationships aren’t enough to ensure security.

But what of Miss Jane Pittman? My friends had never seen it, and I hadn’t seen it in three decades, at least. Surely I remembered the movie through the filter of those subsequent performances, and the hazy memory of the boy who sat in front of the television set. Was Miss Jane Pittman — and Cicely Tyson’s performance — as good as I remembered it?

The answer is emphatically yes.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines (which, as a boy, I ran out and read shortly after seeing the movie), portrays the 110-year life of a Louisiana woman, from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement. As depicted in Tracy Keenan Wynn’s screenplay,** Miss Jane’s survival depends in large measure upon her failure to take action. Those who stand up for themselves — the freed slave Big Laura (played in the movie by the singer Odetta); Laura’s son, Ned; Jane’s common-law husband, Joe Pittman; and young Jimmy, an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. — come to violent ends. She waits and waits for “The One,” the leader she has prayed for, but to no avail. It’s not until the end of her life that Miss Jane takes political action, in one of the most memorable scenes ever filmed for television.

With Michael Murphy (left) as a reporter,
and Beatrice Winde as Lena.

Cicely Tyson portrays Miss Jane in all but the first few years of her life. This gives her a lot to work with as an actress, a range of emotions and experiences, but it also poses challenges, notably physical ones. Makeup artists Rick Baker and Stan Winston help her to surmount many of these, with age makeup that’s — still — just about the most convincing I’ve ever seen. The massive wrinkles are no latex mask: they move as Ms. Tyson moves, and they become, with her, the embodiment of a woman’s life.

But there are other physical challenges, too, mostly associated with making sure that Miss Jane is the same woman in every scene of the movie, even those in which she’s played by another actress, Valerie Odell (lovely and utterly unaffected). One tiny gesture has always impressed me, not least because many of my women relatives do the same thing: the way Miss Jane pounds her fists against the back of any loved one who embraces her.

It’s mostly through an absolute economy of gesture, however, that Ms. Tyson conveys Miss Jane’s extreme old age. She is spry, and yet she is weary — and once we’ve seen her history, we understand why. There is no movement to spare, and thus none of the quaveriness that some actors use when playing old age. She’s frail, but still proud, and one of the most telling moments in the film comes when she waves away her friend Mary (Elinora B. Johnson). She’s impatient to take the most important steps of her life — by herself.

She hits the right vocal notes, too, turning her voice to a soft rasp, maintaining a credible accent, and above all savoring certain words until they turn to poetry — the way so many little old ladies in the South tend to do.

The movie’s climax is briefer than I’d remembered it. I won’t say much about it here, however, because I suspect that, for those seeing the first time, it will seem a little lifetime in a single scene, just as it seemed for me. So many things are going on here, and at this point the viewer’s adrenalin may be pumping so that the details are heightened and time seems to move at another pace — just as it happens in moments of shock or thrill in our own lives.

I will venture to say that, since viewing Miss Jane Pittman for the first time, water has never tasted the same to me.

Ms. Tyson won two Emmy Awards for the movie.
Somehow, it seems 20 wouldn’t be enough.

The movie meant a great deal to me perhaps least of all because I was a diva-mad kid, or because Ms. Tyson’s performance possessed a kind of grandeur that, while not what most people think of as operatic, was always inherently musical. Her work is imbued with the grace that comes to those who hear music that others don’t, and that some people call spirituality.

On a more personal level, the movie gave me a glimpse of another side of my own family story. Miss Jane spends most of her life in and around plantations near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my grandfather’s family owned plantations. Early on I developed the peculiar anxiety of liberals whose ancestors owned slaves: it’s a question that can be summed up as How bad were we? And it’s a question that our white families can never answer satisfactorily. So, timidly, in fits and starts, we go looking for the truth elsewhere.

Directed by John Korty, a specialist in made-for-TV movies, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman fits proudly alongside big-screen films of the 1970s: it possesses the naturalistic seriousness, the maturity, the confidence of Martin Scorsese’s or Francis Ford Coppola’s work (if not quite their flamboyance). And thus it doesn’t try to romanticize or deny the experiences of former slaves.

Some aspects of those experiences are touched on lightly or not at all (sexual exploitation, for example, isn’t mentioned), but there’s a clear-eyed look at the violence (including a massacre of freed slaves and the lynching of a black schoolteacher by Klansmen), the hardships and the privations. We see Cicely Tyson herself chopping sugar cane in the Louisiana heat, and we must instantly understand that it is brutal work.

The movie doesn’t rub our noses in the awfulness of Southern whites (as Roots tended to do), but it doesn’t provide false comfort, either. Ultimately, you realize that no matter how “nice” your ancestors may have been, and no matter how gentle the gentlemen and ladies, the very system they upheld was cruel, and wrong, and there’s no way around that. Miss Jane Pittman helped to open my eyes, and especially when I look at Ms. Tyson’s subsequent career, I have to believe that’s one reason she took the job: not merely because it was a juicy role but because it would matter.***

So now she is turning to The Trip to Bountiful, and with her that story becomes a story of the migration of Southern blacks in the 20th century from rural areas to cities — and of the consequences of that migration. These things happened to white people, too, and it seems that this is the first time Mr. Foote’s play has been performed with black actors in the leading roles. (Ms. Tyson is joined onstage by Cuba Gooding, Jr.; Vanessa Williams, and Condola Rashad.) As I’ve often noted, Mr. Foote’s work holds special meaning for me because our family backgrounds are so similar, to the point that I (and above all, my mother) sometimes feel that he wrote about us.

That “us” will now be a black family, and I will be invited to see myself and my loved ones in them, even as I am invited to appreciate the ways in which their lives weren’t like ours. Art is supposed to help us to understand the thoughts and feelings of other people — and Cicely Tyson is at it again. You can’t make me believe that’s an accident.

Going to Bountiful, via Broadway, with Condola Rashad.

*NOTE: Another star of Miss Jane Pittman, the late Beatrice Winde, appeared in Mr. Foote’s The Young Man from Atlanta on Broadway, when I got to know Mr. Foote. Winde plays Miss Jane’s friend Lena, the mother of Jimmy, the activist.

**Tracy Keenan Wynn was the grandson of comedian Ed Wynn and the son of actor Keenan Wynn, who played, among many other parts in a long career, the white racist magically turned black in Francis Ford Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow.

***We watched Miss Jane Pittman not long after learning of the death of the actress Jean Stapleton, who around the same time took a television role — that of Edith Bunker, on All in the Family, of course — and used it to teach the audience something about women’s lives in a changing America. We may tend to look back at 1970s television as frivolous, and much of it was, and yet it’s striking to look back and see how many artists brought seriousness of purpose to pop culture, precisely when I needed it most.

GENERAL NOTE: Watching Cicely Tyson and her co-stars on The View the other day, I was struck by the way they refer to her as “Miss Cicely,” a sign of their respect for her. I like that: it may be as close to a knighthood as America can offer its finest actors. I’m a feminist, though, so I’ve used “Ms.”

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The Trip to Harrison

The art of conversation: Sarah Nancy (Green)
and Dolores (Hallie Foote) in Blind Date.

A certain kind of genteel discourse prevalent in the South has over the years proved both a blessing and a curse. For many generations, talking around unpleasant subjects upheld the social order, but it also prevented the solution of longstanding problems seldom if ever addressed. Even today Southerners tend to be great storytellers and conversationalists: they can talk a great deal, but often it’s what goes unsaid that is most important.

The late Horton Foote demonstrated this again and again with a particularly Texan accent in plays for the stage and the screen. Three short pieces now being performed by the Primary Stages troupe at the 59E59 Theaters give New York audiences a wide range of the possibilities of Southern speech — perhaps most notably in The One-Armed Man, the second of the plays, in which conversation breaks down and violence erupts, of a kind virtually unknown elsewhere in Mr. Foote’s multi-voluminous work.

Mr. Foote sets all three plays in Harrison, Texas, the name he gave to the town of Wharton, where he was born and where he set most of his work; “Harrison, TX” is the portmanteau title for this production. Harrison lies even closer spiritually than Wharton lies geographically to Goliad, my mother’s hometown, a phenomenon that helps to account for the degree of kinship I feel with this author — one that my mother felt certain had to be genealogical, as well. (It isn’t, as Mr. Foote himself once confirmed.)

The playbill shows Mr. Foote at his desk.
Blurry photo by WVM. Some day I have got to get a working scanner.

Under Pam McKinnon’s adroit stage direction and together lasting about 90 minutes, the three plays are performed without intermission. The first, Blind Date set in 1928, brilliantly sets up the rest, as Dolores, a middle-aged matron, provides her niece (and, doubtless, much of the audience) a crash course in the kind of genteel conversation I’m talking about. It’s easy to see that Dolores’ sister has fobbed her daughter off on Dolores, having failed to find any eligible prospects for her back home; now Dolores rises to Amanda Wingfield desperation as she strives to make good on one last chance, in the form of a gentleman caller named Felix.

The ensuing scenes make for riotous comedy, of a kind we don’t often see from Mr. Foote; it’s lofted especially high by Hallie Foote (the playwright’s daughter and always one of his finest interpreters) as Dolores, and by the brilliant Andrea Lynn Green as the stubborn young Sarah Nancy. The girl has no interest whatever in Felix, whom she describes as “looking like a warthog.” In the person of Evan Jonigkeit, he’s quite attractive — albeit very nearly as ill-equipped as Sarah Nancy for courtship rituals. Dolores’ husband, Robert (Devon Abner), interrupts periodically.

Welcome to my parlor: Jonigkeit, Green, and Hallie Foote.

Intriguingly, it’s unclear exactly how old Sarah Nancy is: Green plays her as something of a modern-day teenage slacker, which must make her more immediately recognizable to the New York audience. There’s no mention of her going to college, although we’re told that Dolores went — a rare achievement among Texan women of that generation. But Felix is already selling insurance for a living and considering a change to a second career as a mortician: he’s a grownup, and Sarah Nancy is being groomed as his prospective bride.

There’s an undercurrent of seriousness here: we see that, for all of Dolores’ skill at conversation, her own husband pays scant attention to what she says, and cares less about her ambitions for Sarah Nancy than about the supper Dolores is too busy to prepare. Naturally, no one ever suggests that he make his own supper. Dolores tries to steer Sarah Nancy towards subjects of interest to men in general and to Felix in particular; when she protests, Dolores informs her that “Nobody cares what you’re interested in.” In Harrison society, women’s roles are rigidly circumscribed — as we’ll see again in the final play, The Midnight Caller, set in 1952.

The One-Armed Man: When language fails.
Bobb and Cendese.

The second and shortest of the plays, The One-Armed Man, also set in 1928, introduces us to C.W. Rowe (Jeremy Bobb), manager of a cotton gin, bluntly ignorant of the consequences of his behavior on those around him — beginning with his beleaguered bookkeeper (Abner again, all but unrecognizable). In a nod to contemporary sensibilities, Rowe even cites his membership in a white citizens’ council as an indication of his upstanding position in society. (The New York audience gasped at the mention.) So it’s no surprise that he is so little inclined to help the former employee, McHenry (Alexander Cendese), who lost his arm in a worksite accident.*

Rowe’s offers of charity aren’t enough for McHenry, who demands that Rowe “give me back my arm” — and draws a pistol to make his point. Ever a student of Chekhov, Mr. Foote abides by the Russian rule, and the gun does indeed go off, but not before a storm of increasingly inarticulate “conversation” marked by McHenry’s rage and Rowe’s mounting panic. Even conversation with God — prayer, which is for a small-town Texan perhaps the most familiarly ingrained language — fails.

Employee relations: Bobb and Abner.

At a talkback with the cast following the Wednesday matinée, several audience members pronounced themselves mystified by The One-Armed Man and quizzed Cendese in particular about his character’s purpose. Hallie Foote observed that the play examines class distinctions, and it does, but I wonder whether Mr. Foote’s intent was even more specifically political — writing as he was of a state where “business-friendly” policies mean that, to this day, workmen’s compensation is virtually nonexistent. (Gail Collins underscored that point in her recent book, As Texas Goes.)

An outstanding candidate for the next Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, Cendese is arguably too handsome to play McHenry, but he’s exactly right as Harvey Weems, the title character of The Midnight Caller: the sort of doomed beauty found in so many stories of small towns in the South. Here, Harvey is a young man of good family whose love for Helen Crews (Jenny Dare Paulin) can’t surmount the opposition of both their families and his budding alcoholism. After four years of “trying,” Helen is ready to move on, but Harry haunts her, standing outside the boarding house where she lives and calling out her name — much to the consternation of the other ladies who live there.

The ladies of the boarding house: Green, Houdyshell, Bacon.

They’re in a tizzy already because a gentleman boarder (Bobb again, infinitely more sympathetic) has moved in; now they’re fearful for their reputations, even as they hope he’ll carry them away. Here Mr. Foote illustrates the effects of one more kind of conversation — namely, gossip — on a community. The ladies tell tales of Helen’s past, and they worry that soon enough, other ladies will talk about them the same way.

None worries more than Alma Jean Jordan (the sublime Mary Bacon), a single working woman as thin-skinned as she is narrow-minded. Trying to appease her are the owner of the boarding house (Hallie Foote again) and two other unmarried boarders, young “Cutie” Spencer (Green again) and a schoolteacher, Miss Rowena Douglas (richly incarnated by Jane Houdyshell, so memorable from last year’s revival of Sondheim’s Follies).

Midnight Caller: Houdyshell and Bobb.

Throughout the production, I enjoyed McKinnon’s astute appreciation for even the smallest details — precisely what one needs from any director in Mr. Foote’s work — her embrace of both the playwright’s humor and his darker themes. She elicits an ease among the actors that really does make them feel they’ve known one another forever. McKinnon makes excellent use of Marion Williams’ set design, in which simple but evocatively decorated walls and a staircase shift to create three different spaces, with a fourth (Helen’s room in the boarding house) convincingly established just by a change in Tyler Micoleau’s lighting design.

Harrison, TX provides first-time visitors with an excellent overview of Mr. Foote’s work, in circumstances that are almost ideal. For those of us who know his work already, a little or a lot, the production offers substantial rewards, as well: the master flexing his muscles, trying a few things he hasn’t tried, while remaining entirely true to himself. In short, I recommend this production to anyone seeking a better understanding of this authentic titan of the American theater.

Harrison, TX runs through 15 September and is just one of several offerings dedicated to Mr. Foote at Primary Stages this season. For more information and tickets, click here.

NOTE: My portrait of Horton Foote appears here. The little essay I wrote on the occasion of his passing appears here.

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Mr. Foote Goes Home

It is with great sorrow that I mark the passing of the author Horton Foote. Since he lived to 92, one can hardly fault him for leaving the stage too soon; his was a life well spent, and well shared. Yet I shall miss him sorely, as one misses any loved one, any family member, any kindred spirit. Somewhere, a carillon is pealing, for a mighty angel has gotten his wings.

On this, the 173rd anniversary of the fall of the Alamo, I conclude with an old hymn, one that figures in the film of his masterpiece, The Trip to Bountiful, and that speaks to his screenplay, Tender Mercies.

Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling for you and for me;
Patiently Jesus is waiting and watching,
Watching for you and for me!

Refrain:
Come home, come home,
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home!
Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling,
Calling, “O, sinner, come home!”

Why should we tarry when Jesus is pleading,
Pleading for you and for me?
Why should we linger and heed not His mercies,
Mercies for you and for me!

Refrain

O, for the wonderful love He has promised,
Promised for you and for me!
Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon,
Pardon for you and for me.

Refrain

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Horton Foote

Hallie Foote (the playwright’s daughter), James DeMarse, Devon Abner and Maggie Lacey in Dividing the Estate

On my return to New York next month, I hope to see Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, currently on Broadway. (Such is my luck that, now that I’ve written this, the show probably will post a closing notice.) Mr. Foote’s writing fascinates me. It speaks so eloquently of my own background that it’s a wonder I manage to write anything at all: almost anything I could possibly say about Texas, Mr. Foote has said already, and profoundly. Maybe that’s why I was the rare student who didn’t write about family, when I was in graduate school.

Mr. Foote’s characters resemble my family, both in general attitudes and, sometimes startlingly, in specific traits. My mother had the same impression, and she seized the opportunity a few years ago to ask Mr. Foote whether his family had known hers. Possibly so, Mr. Foote believed; some of the names rang a bell. The distance between Goliad, my mother’s hometown, and Wharton, Mr. Foote’s, isn’t great, yet what strikes me as more important is the proximity between Goliad and Harrison, the name Mr. Foote gives to Wharton in all of his writing. One needn’t drive to get from one town to the other. One needs merely to listen.

Mr. Foote has written a great many plays, and several films, and I can’t claim to know more than a fraction of them. Just keeping up with the newest plays is a busy job. The gentleman is 92 now, but very much active. While in New York in October, I spoke with Roy Harris, the production stage manager for Dividing the Estate, who reported that Mr. Foote, requested to revise a scene, submitted the requested changes the very next day. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that: he’s been playwriting a very long time, and he surely knows what he’s doing.

New York critics tend to compare him to Anton Chekhov, and I understand the comparison. His plays are witty, not comic, and though his characters talk at length, it very often appears on its surface to be piffle. With Mr. Foote as with Chekhov, one has to listen between the lines to hear the truth. Yet the analogy goes only so far. Mr. Foote’s work is more firmly grounded in place than Chekhov’s: very few of Mr. Foote’s plays could be transplanted from 20th-century Harrison, in the way that productions of Chekhov’s plays often are set far from 19th-century Russia.

In some respects, Mr. Foote’s plays are closer to Greek tragedy than to Russian naturalism. Actual dramatic incident is kept offstage; plot developments are more likely to be announced by a messenger than enacted before the audience. And though Mr. Foote has yet to employ a chorus (to my knowledge), his characters do comment at length on a given predicament; they recount old stories and invoke heroes long gone.

A Horton Foote play unfurls gradually, subtly. I’ve encountered critics and “civilian” audience members who find that pace to be tedious; they grow impatient with the characters’ refusal to speak their minds directly. Welcome to the South, folks.

Mr. Foote’s Wharton/Harrison, like my Goliad, is more Southern than Southwestern. It depends on a practiced gentility to hold together the straining social fabric. We have made a habit of not coming to the point, of prettifying our feelings, of obscuring our desires and resentments. This applies to race, obviously, but also to other big subjects, particularly money and sex, and in all of Mr. Foote’s work that I’ve seen, from the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird to The Young Man from Atlanta, at least one of these topics is central.

It was during the production of The Young Man from Atlanta that I got to know Mr. Foote a little — which may help to explain why I refer to him as “Mr. Foote.” He’s a Southern gentleman, and I could no more address him by his first name, or even as “Foote,” than punch him in the nose. I helped to produce a profile on him for CBS Sunday Morning, and I sat in on the interviews conducted by his fellow Whartonian, Dan Rather. (Over the course of their time together, they discovered that they’d been delivered by the same doctor.)

Mr. Foote’s physical resemblance to Clarence the Angel, the character played by Henry Travers in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, is at first startling and then endearing. He may be an angel, or close enough, in his gentleness and wisdom, and I’ll always remember his kindness to me and, above all, to my mother. Their conversation seemed to bring him as much pleasure as it did her. She reminds me that he told her how he learned to write dialogue and to tell stories: by listening to the conversations of his lady relatives.

(Her implication may or may not be that I need to spend more time listening to her. She is a Southern lady, after all, and unlikely to come out and say such a thing directly; I must guess at her meaning.)

Much of Mr. Foote’s concerns a past I don’t know, yet it chimes precisely with the stories I heard from my grandmother and from my Great-Great Aunt Letitia, stories that are repeated now by my mother and her sister, and that may be repeated by my cousins and me, in our turn. One of Mr. Foote’s most memorable characters is Mrs. Carrie Watts, the protagonist of The Trip to Bountiful, a lonely old woman in search of her girlhood home and of a past that, if it ever existed, she can’t find. Because Mr. Foote has written so much and so well, I have a better chance of being nothing like Mrs. Carrie Watts. I can always find my Bountiful in the pages of his plays.

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