Beginnings by Horton Foote

Author:Horton Foote
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER 8

* * *

In January 1936, Pauline Lord opened in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome at the National Theater. It received wonderful notices from the daily papers. Stark Young in The New Republic began his review this way:

No matter what the outcome may be, an event in the theater, may differ almost generically from the majority of events, for the mere reason of some presence in it, be that actor, dramatist or what not. When Miss Lord appears in a realistic piece, no matter how inferior the play may be, it should be taken as a theatrical event of the first rank.

Ruth Gordon and Raymond Massey were in the play, too, and I decided it was something I wanted to see. I had gone to the theater as often as I could since I’d been in New York, buying a seat in the second balcony for fifty-five cents. I had already learned the trick of looking down from the second balcony at the orchestra below, just before the house lights dimmed, to see if there were any unsold seats, and if there were, going down after the first intermission to take one of them. I’d seen, starting from the balcony, Winterset with Burgess Meredith and Margo, The Old Maid with Judith Anderson and Helen Menken, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Kind Lady with Grace George, Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End and Remember the Day, all popular plays of the day with popular actresses and actors, and from the orchestra, taken by a friend, Nazimova’s powerful performance as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. For some reason, though, I felt even if I had to pay, I wanted to see Ethan Frome from the very beginning in the orchestra. I went to a matinee and I thought long and hard before finally paying three dollars and sixty cents for an orchestra ticket. I had not read the Edith Wharton novel the play was based on, but I knew it was a favorite of many of my friends. I was shown to my seat by an usher and began to read my program when the house lights dimmed and there was the usual hush in the theater before a play started.

Ethan Frome is set in the early twentieth century in rural New England. Ethan and Zenobia Frome have been married a number of years. She is an invalid constantly making Ethan or anyone around aware of that fact. Their life is a hard one. What little they have comes from his farming land that is poor and unyielding. The winters are long and severe. Zenobia, from a neighboring town, had been hired by Ethan to nurse his mentally unstable mother. The day of the mother’s funeral, Ethan, fearing being left alone, asks Zenobia to stay and marry him. She agrees. They have been married seven years when Zenobia asks to bring in Mattie Silver, a distant cousin who is penniless, to live with them and take over the cooking and the housework. Ethan says he can’t afford feeding another person, but Zenobia finally gets her way and Mattie is sent for.

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