Orphans' Home

"Porter shows how the small-town Southern culture speaks through Horace as his life story unfolds while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation. She explains that Foote's signature style - which replaces stage directions, poetic language, and suspense-driven narratives with sparse, restrained dialogue and seemingly actionless plots - creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. Similarly, Foote uses recurring character types and motifs, interrelated images and symbols, and parallel and inverted events that reverberate within and among the plays, employing language and structure in innovative ways. In comparing the cycle with the works of Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of Southern literature and American drama."--BOOK JACKET.