The Young Man From Atlanta
By Albert Williams
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Foote’s is the more old-fashioned of the two pieces. A 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner headed for Broadway, The Young Man From Atlanta is as well made as its impressively realistic setting at the Goodman–designer Tom Lynch’s sprawling living room, complete with stone-walled hearth–and as carefully arranged as the two strands of pearls with which costumer David C. Woolard has adorned the matronly neck of Lily Dale, Will’s wife. It charts, touchingly but a little too neatly, the way the Kidders respond to a series of spiritual and financial misfortunes: the unexplained suicide of their 37-year-old son, Will’s layoff from his job and subsequent heart attack, and Lily Dale’s squandering of her savings on her dead son’s ex-roommate, the young Atlantan of the title.
Randy, the out-of-towner, is never seen because Will consistently rebuffs his attempts to pay a call on his dead friend’s parents, for reasons only partly clarified at the end of this two-hour one-act. But the offstage Randy colors much of the action: Will, abruptly fired so his job can be assigned to his lower-paid young assistant, hopes to fall back on Lily’s savings–thousands of dollars he’s given her over the years–only to learn she’s “loaned” it to Randy, a fountain of hard-luck stories. The money aside, Randy represents to Will his perceived failure as a father, reflected in his son’s death (which Lily Dale insists was an accident) and mysterious lifestyle. (The implication of secret, guilt-ridden homosexuality is never addressed–either Will can’t bring himself to face it or Foote is too embarrassed to admit falling back on Tennessee Williams’s and Robert Anderson’s leftovers.)
Sandy Shinner’s capable cast in Sidney Bechet Killed a Man have little chance to breathe a similar fullness into their characters. Jack McLaughlin-Gray labors mightily to deliver Phil’s torrents of text in a way that suggests a rational man trying to understand his mounting emotion, but he ends up signaling the character’s crisis rather than living it, and Deanna Dunagan and John Judd are similarly hamstrung by the roles of Emily and Marcel. A.C. Smith and Kirsten Daurelio have nicely quirky moments in several brief minor parts. But the most important supporting character never appears: Claire, Marcel’s unfaithful wife. Where Randy’s nonappearance is an element of the mystery in The Young Man From Atlanta, Claire’s absence feels like Flack simply didn’t know how to deal with her–or else he was trying to keep the payroll down. Either way, it’s a serious flaw, but one easily rectified in the rewrite the play needs if it’s to have any successful life beyond this premature premiere.
