[Feingold is an American critic and educator. In the excerpt below, he questions the validity of Foote's portrait of contemporary American society in The Young Man from Atlanta.]

Horton Foote's plays invariably amaze me. Characters come and go, a situation of some kind is broached, and something happens, or is said to happen, which does or doesn't resolve said situation, more often the latter. That's all there is, a very sparse return for the ticket price, yet Foote's plays keep getting produced, applauded, praised. His work seems to fulfill some idea Americans have, incomprehensible to me, of what a play is, or maybe of what their lives are: a representation of people in a room, engaging in stilted, pro forma talk, mostly to impart data the audience either doesn't need or already has.

Superficially, the ambience of Foote's plays is naturalistic, but there is little detail and less personalizing. Though the setting is usually Texas, the dialogue rarely ventures into the wild, colloquial excess that gives Texas talk its charm and color; the people might as easily be new arrivals from Connecticut. The long speeches, replete with he saids and I told hims, often replay, unaltered, conversations we've just heard. Constantly reiterating their life stories for each other, Foote's people never appear to have any shared past—or, in some respects, any past at all. What shapes their fates is less destiny than coincidence.

Will Kidder (Ralph Waite), the retirement-age hero of The Young Man From Atlanta, has worked for the same firm 30 years, in an executive position, but seems to have no pension or investments. When he's fired—it's 1950 and the new boss wants younger, more competitive men—he gets three months' severance, which won't keep up the costly new home he's just built to distract himself and his wife Lily Dale (Carlin Glynn) from the gloom brought on by their son Bill's death.

Bill, an unmarried 37-year-old, who shared a room in an Atlanta boarding house with a younger man while working at a drudge job, has inexplicably walked into a lake and drowned; he was a non-swimmer. What this implies is self-evident, but Foote, like his characters, isn't about to discuss the matter. Instead, we get a coy game of was-Bill-or-wasn't-Bill, with the long arm of coincidence providing a dubious onstage witness—Lily Dale's stepfather's great-nephew, if you please—to counter the version of his life given by the (unseen) roommate, who has sponged extensively off Bill and is now trying to repeat the process with Lily.

Of course, the great-nephew's story—Bill was a straight upstanding chap being rooked by his fourflusher room-mate—is as suspect as its opposite: He himself is hitting up Lily's stepfather for money, on various pretexts; maybe it's an Atlantan custom. It's anyone's guess if the young man of Foote's title is the one we see, or the one we don't see, just as we never know if Will and Lily's son was a major queer who killed himself in 1950s despair, or a generous; pious young fellow who abruptly decided to have a swim and got out of his depth. Will, having survived a heart attack, and settled for a lesser job in his old firm, decides that he'd rather not know: He makes Lily Dale send the roommate away, effectively banishing all future discussion of Bill.

This desperate desire not to face reality is certainly very American, but does Foote want us to indict it or empathize with it? His flat style, with its eerily empty, echolaliac lines, occasionally suggests that he thinks he's writing satire—the American family reduced to an Absurdist organism. That would explain Will's repeated boast, just before his firing, that he lives in "the greatest city in the greatest country in the world." And it might explain the presence of no less than two supportive, serenely pious, black female domestics. (Watching Frances Foster and Beatrice Winde, the two sublime actresses who play these roles, snatch eagerly at every scrap of individuality in their few lines is a disquieting experience in itself.)

At the same time, it's hard to imagine writing so flatfooted and colorless as a vehicle for irony; it's like calling Grandma Moses a political cartoonist. Foote's bland, featureless Texas, with its well-meaning souls reciting cliches to each other while dodging every dangerous fact or emotion, is neither naturalistic nor satiric, but a kind of urbanized folk legend, its figures less like dramatic characters than like patchwork dolls or the faces carved in apples, creations of unenlightened, mechanical craft rather than art. And because he offers full-scale images of life, not tiny objects to decorate a shelf, Foote's plays carry a considerably eerier resonance than the apple-carver's gargoyles. He hears America singing, and its song says, "I'm stupid, I'm comfortably off, I pay lip service to God, and I'm happy that way. Don't bother me about anything serious."