![Hallie Foote andEbon Moss-Bachrach inWhen They Speak of Rita Hallie Foote andEbon Moss-Bachrach inWhen They Speak of Rita](http://cdn.theatermania.com/article/722/1.jpg)
Ebon Moss-Bachrach in
When They Speak of Rita
You could say it’s Foote fete-ish. The fact that Daisy B. Foote wrote When They Speak of Rita, sister Hallie Foote plays the title role, and dad Horton Foote directed the five-character drama currently running Off-Broadway at Primary Stages. And furthermore, the fact that they’re having such a good time doing it. Which doesn’t surprise them. “It surprises other people–when they think about their own families,” Daisy says. “We’re very close.”
The closeness is apparent just after the lights have faded on a Sunday matinee, when–before turning their attention to an interviewer–the three of them have a quick huddle about a line cut in that performance. They all agree amiably that the revision makes a substantial difference, and will be kept. Then dad, daughter, and daughter take seats in the front rows of the small auditorium: Horton round-faced, white-haired and jolly, and Daisy and Hallie fresh-faced with long hair and open expressions.
Indeed, while Hallie is more glamorous than the discontented housewife she just portrayed, the Footes tend to look like the down-to-earth characters they write about and/or play–even though Horton and Daisy set their works in very different regions of the country. Raised in Wharton, Texas, he (who estimates his full-length and one-act plays now number over 50 and recently published Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood) tends to write about doings in the imaginary Harrison, Texas. Raised in Nyack, New York and New Boston, New Hampshire, she (who has written six plays to date) tends to write about imaginary doings in Tremont, New Hampshire.
But even though Horton and Daisy memorialize dots on the United States map that couldn’t be much farther apart, they deal with similar subjects similarly. It’s like-father-like-daughter in that they take middle-class people enduring mundane lives and present those lives with perfect dialogue-and-action pitch. In When They Speak of Rita, for instance, Rita Potter
![From When They Speak of Rita From When They Speak of Rita](http://cdn.theatermania.com/article/722/3.jpg)
would like to do something with herself other than clean people’s houses, but her longings to cater are mocked by her road agent husband, Asa, and car mechanic son, Warren. During a few fitful months when a couple of scandals are taking place elsewhere in Tremont, she is so frustrated by her colorless routine that she runs off with her son’s best friend. And then comes home–to Warren’s dismay and Asa’s muted satisfaction.
“She’s based on a lot of different people, but one person in particular,” Daisy admits. “There’s some of her in all of us. There are moments in our lives when we just become completely overwhelmed.” Horton and Hallie were overwhelmed by Rita in a different fashion. Daisy began her play for an American Conservatory Theater two-week young person’s program, which is when Hallie saw it–twice. Initially moved watching the work as played by a cast of actors between the ages of 15 and 18, she returned to test her reaction to the text. She was moved again. “This is a powerful play,” she remembers thinking. So she took on the role of Rita for a reading at the Cherry Lane Alternative in Manhattan, which is when Horton came to see it. “And that’s how it all happened,” Daisy recalls: the plan for the three of them to work together.