The Orphans' Home Cycle, Part Three: The Story of a Family
“The three short dramas that make up THE STORY OF A FAMILY…are both the starkest and most sentimental of this lovingly painted life-and-times portrait…Foote weaves his melodrama into the plain cloth of everyday events. He knows life’s natural littleness doesn’t cease when big events happen.” —The New York Times.
“The show is filled with riches. To his credit, Foote…doesn’t tie things up with a pretty bow—rather with something more uncertain. The line that lingers near the end is a simple one: 'A family is a remarkable thing, isn’t it?' It is. So is this theatrical event.” —New York Daily News.
“…elevated and elemental, like Greek tragedy…the action exists in a kind of suspended reality—not bound by the laws of time and faintly ritualistic…temporal strangeness only heightens the complex pleasures of Foote’s melancholy masterpiece.” —New York Magazine.
“Foote’s final gift to the stage is glorious, an essential American masterwork…Foote’s sympathetic but rigorous eye misses nothing. He puts his characters forward without judgment, sentimentalizing nothing and letting us make what we will of the unfolding human panoply. If there’s a better illustration of the adage that universality is rooted in specificity, I can’t think of it.” —Backstage.
