[Christiansen is an American journalist, editor, and critic who frequently writes about Chicago's artistic community. In the following review, he praises Foote's use of characterization and dialogue, and discusses his treatment of family in The Young Man from Atlanta.]

Horton Foote, the master miniaturist of American drama, has created a small but potent domestic tragedy with his new play, The Young Man From Atlanta.

A writer for more than 50 of his 78 years, Foote is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplays of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. But he has been a diligent and prolific playwright, as well, turning out over the years a series of low-key, hand-polished family dramas, many of them reflecting his own heritage in southeastern Texas.

In recognition of his work, the enterprising off-off-Broadway Signature Theatre Company this year is devoting its entire season to four Foote dramas, including this world premiere.

Here, as in much of his work, Foote works within a tight family circle and he builds his story with layers of small increments.

The central event of the play already has occurred when the story begins in Houston in the spring of 1950. It is the death by drowning of the 37-year-old bachelor son of Will and Lily Dale Kidder, a death that has left both parents traumatized.

In her grief over the loss of her only child, the sprightly Lily Dale has turned to religion, while Will, convinced that his son was a suicide, is wrestling with indications that he was a homosexual, living in an Atlanta YMCA with a gold-digging deadbeat 10 years his junior.

We never see this young man from Atlanta, and, though evidence points to the belief that he was indeed a liar and a cheat who sponged off the Kidder son, we do not know for sure whether he was more victim or victimizer.

In the end, he remains a mystery, a comfort to Lily Dale, who needs to believe the best of him (and her dead son) and a source of dread to Will, who fears to find out the answers to the questions raised by his son's suicide.

Clinging to each other in mutual misery, the grieving parents are frightened, battered survivors of their past, facing the future with a desperate, last-stand hope that all will somehow turn out well.

Lasting a few minutes under two hours, and performed without intermission, the play is a wonder of strong drama built through ordinary talk and everyday incident.

Once the action gets past the Death of a Salesman-like expository first scene set in Will's office it moves to the Kidder living room and really grabs hold in the quiet, complex characterizations of the Kidders and their family.

The touching intimacy of the drama, directed by Peter Masterson, is beautifully captured on the small stage of the Signature's 80-seat auditorium.

Ralph Waite, the steadfast, resourceful father of TV's The Waltons, superbly portrays another weak and frail, parent here. With calmly modulated sensitivity and sharply honed timing, he shows us a bluff and optimistic man at the end of his tether, tapped out in spirit and body. Simply to see him collapse in weariness on the living room sofa is to understand precisely how drained of the old vigor his life has become.

Carlin Glynn, costumed to perfection in her '50s dresses, is an ideal counterpoint to Waite's gray lion. Red-haired and still kittenish (she calls her husband "Daddy"), she is a simple, spoiled woman who suddenly sees her secure world shattered beyond repair.

Backing them up is a fine ensemble cast in which even the smallest roles—a layabout great-nephew and an aged former housekeeper—cast light on the Kidder family secrets.

The drama in The Young Man from Atlanta is never stormy, and its humor, including a running joke about Eleanor Roosevelt is never uproarious.

But the play is very strong and solid, its power carried by the author's remarkable writing skills and by his delicate probing of deep family truths.

We should see more of his work in Chicago.