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Home , Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Left in the Dark

Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespearean Festival

Foxfire The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. They are meant, instead, to bean educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespearean Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2009, Utah Shakespearean Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespearean Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover illustration by Philip W. Hermansen Contents InformationFoxfire on the Playwrights Cronyn and Cooper: A Combination for Success 4

Information on the Play Synopsis 7 Characters 8

Scholarly Articles on the Play “My Feet Took t’ Walkin’,” but My Heart Is Looking Back 9

Utah Shakespearean Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Cronyn and Cooper: A Combination for Success By Marlo M. Ihler Take a world-famous actor and a major fantasy writer and add the back hills of Appalachia, and what do you get? The Tony-award winning play, Foxfire, of course. Actor and author combined their extensive talents for storytelling and created a charming tale of generational connections, the challenges of aging, and finding joy in life. Cronyn and Cooper, both extremely versatile and well-respected artists in their own rights, came together in 1980 to create Foxfire. This was their first collaboration together to create a vehicle for Cronyn and then-wife to act together. The main source for this play came from The Foxfire Books, a compilation of magazine articles written by Georgian high school students in the 1960s about their grandparents’ homesteading generation in the Appalachian Mountains. In 2007 critic Nancy K. Wellard said of their collaboration: “When Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn wrote this play, they offered, in addition to the sociological considerations we associate with the “Foxfire” books, a kind of metaphorical appreciation that they developed around the qualities assigned to the foxfire effect . . . dealing with the decay of the old orders as they pass and are pushed aside, no longer valued as long-established ways of living . . . that the old way must fall that we may see the luminescence of their decay as emblematic of a transition (The Island Packet, www.hiltonheadtheatre.com/index.php/reviews/33-about-scrcs-production-of-foxfire). Foxfire was the starting point of a long friendship and playwrighting partnership for Cronyn and Cooper that, after Tandy died, eventually resulted in marriage. Hume Cronyn Hume Cronyn was a prolific stage, screen, and radio performer, director, producer, and writer. He was born in , Ontario, Canada, in 1911, son of a brewing company heiress and prominent businessman and politician. His affluent family played an important role in the civic, political, and religious affairs of the region. Growing up, he was an avid fisherman and, while in college, he was an amateur featherweight boxer. He was even nominated to be on the Canadian Olympic boxing team in 1932. His parents wanted him to study law, but after a year at McGill University in Montreal, he longed to drop out to pursue acting instead. His mother convinced him to stay at the university one more year, after which he began to follow his dream of acting. He moved to New York City to study at the American Academy for Dramatic Arts under the renowned director and teacher . He made his theatre debut at the Montreal Repertory Company in 1930, his Broadway debut in 1934, and his film debut in 1943 in ’s . He appeared in other Hitchcock productions and was also a writer for and . His first marriage was a short, discreet affair. He married Emily Woodruff in 1935, a fellow student at the AADA, who wanted to keep their marriage a secret from her family. They never lived together and were divorced the next year. In 1940 he met the woman with whom he would spend the next fifty-four years of his

4 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 life. He and Jessica Tandy married in 1942 and had two children. They frequently appeared together on stage, screen, and radio, including such shows as A Delicate Balance, , The Marriage, Cocoon, and Foxfire. They became one of the most celebrated husband-and-wife acting teams of the twentieth century.

Some of his other popular films were The Seventh Cross (for which he was nomi- nated for an Academy Award), , , and The Pelican Brief. He was a multi-Emmy and Tony-award winning actor, including a special Lifetime Achievement Tony presented to him and Jessica Tandy in 1994, the year she died. Other honors included induction into the American and Canadian Theatre Halls of Fame, the Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Medal. In 1991 he published his autobiography, The Terrible Liar, interestingly, at Susan Cooper’s urging. They had maintained a strong playwrighting partnership as well as a personal friendship throughout the years. Cronyn and Cooper were married in 1996, until Cronyn’s death of prostate cancer in 2003. Susan Cooper Susan Cooper’s writing career was, and still is, as equally successful as Cronyn’s acting career if one can compare the two. She was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, England in 1935 and was an Oxford college graduate. Her first job was as a reporter (under Ian Fleming’s direction) and a feature writer for London’s The Sunday Times. She wrote books in her spare time, the first of which were Mandrake, a fantasy novel for adults, and Over Sea, Under Stone, a fantasy novel for younger readers. “To the horror of my friends and relations,” she says she left England at the age of twenty-seven to marry a widowed American MIT professor with whom she later had two children, but would divorce in 1983 (http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-cooper-susan. asp). She continued to write for a British newspaper and wrote several more books, including a biography of her friend and British writer J. B. Priestley, and Dawn of Fear, a sort-of autobiography about her childhood during World War II. Her next series of books, the award-winning The Dark Is Rising, centers around a battle between light and dark and employs elements of Arthurian and Celtic legends. During this time, she was terribly homesick for England and this may have been part of the reason she decided to write these books. This series is the one for which she is best known. Following this successful period she met Hume Cronyn and collaborated on Foxfire, her first major play. It was initially performed in Stratford, Canada, and then at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis before it went to Broadway in November of 1982. It had a successful eight-month run there at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Later, Cooper adapted the play for television and received an Emmy nomination for her work. John Denver, Cronyn, and Tandy (who won an Emmy) starred. Along with Cooper and Cronyn’s award-winning screenplay for The Dollmaker starring , they also adapted Terry Kay’s novel To Dance with the White Dog for television in 1993. Cooper has also written children’s picture books, essays, lectures, stage works, and additional youth and adult fiction, including King of Shadows about her “greatest hero,” Shakespeare (http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-cooper-susan.asp). She is considered a major fantasy writer, having written most of her life. She charmingly talks about her busiest time as a writer . . . at age ten:

Utah Shakespearean Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 “The busiest time of my life as a writer was probably the year I turned ten. . . . I wrote three plays for a puppet theatre built by the boy next door, collaborated on a weekly newspaper with the son of my piano teacher, and wrote and illustrated a very small book” (Something About the Author Autobiography Series, vol. 6. 1988). Margaret K. McElderry of Horn Book highly praised Cooper’s career, saying “Music and , old tales and legends, prose and poetry, theatre and reality, imagination and intellect, power and control, a strong sense of place and people both past and present—all are part of the magic that has touched Susan Cooper” (1976, p. 367). Both the papers of Hume Cronyn and Susan Cooper are preserved, Cronyn’s at the Library of Congress (as the Cronyn-Tandy papers) and Cooper’s in the Lillian H. Smith Collection at the Toronto Public Library. Additional Sources: “The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives.” Vol. 7, 2003-2005, pp 112-114, Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2007. www.accuracyproject.org/cbe-Cronyn,Hume.html. www.imbd.com. http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/index.cfm?fuseaction=showIndividual&enti ty_id=3714&source_type=A

6 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: Foxfire Annie Nations is doing her chores on her cabin porch in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia and anticipating a visit from her son, Dillard. Annie and her husband, Hector, built Stony Lonesome, their quiet homestead, but Dillard, their son, long ago rejected the idea of being a farmer like his father. Much to Hector’s chagrin, he makes his living as a country singer and has only a small family who rarely come to visit. Prince Carpenter, a local real estate man, comes by to talk. He offers to buy the farm from Annie, as he has bought the land of most of her neighbors. She struggles to know what to do. Holly Burrell, a family friend, also comes to visit Annie when Dillard shows up unexpectedly before a concert he is playing in the nearby town. They talk Annie into going to his show that night. After Holly leaves, Dillard tries to persuade Annie into moving closer to him so he can help care for her. During their conversation, she senses something is wrong with Dillard. At the concert Dillard puts on a flashy show in a good ol’ boy style that annoys Holly. Afterwards, Dillard surprises Annie and Holly by showing back up at Stony Lonesome. As they talk, he tells Holly that he wants Annie to move to Florida with him, but she sees Annie’s love for her home and the roots she has made there. Dillard confronts conflicts of his own, while Annie faces the decision of whether to stay or go. Is it time to leave her home and its memories of her husband and family? As flashbacks throughout the show help portray important times in the Nations’s family, all can relate to the joy of relationships and the struggle of holding onto one’s own roots.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: Foxfire Annie Nations: An elderly woman living on her family farm in the mountains of Georgia. Hector Nations: Annie’s husband. Prince Carpenter: A real estate man wanting to buy Annie’s farm. Holly Burrell: A young teacher and friend of the Nations family. Dillard Nations: Annie and Hector’s son, a traveling country singer and musician. Doctor: The family doctor who delivered Dillard.

8 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 “My Feet Took t’ Walkin’,” but My Heart Is Looking Back By Amanda Caraway There was a time in America when people planted by the signs and lived off the land. The values of the people, as well as the memory of their ancestors, were kept alive through an oral history found in folklore, myths, and song. History was passed through the generations with oral tradition, and no official archives existed. Viewing the play Foxfire gives us a chance to revisit this world and view the performance traditions that tell us so much about the fading culture of the Appalachian Mountains. In her book The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor defines the archive as written history, and the repertoire as performance or “embodied practice or knowledge” ([Durham: Duke University Press, 2003], 19). Like most early American civilizations, the repertoire of the Appalachian region was strong throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unfortunately, the valuable history of the region began to die with the early inhabitants, since the performance traditions were not kept alive by younger generations. Grandparents across America have taken valuable memory with them to the grave because they didn’t think our generation cared to know. However, thanks to the efforts of a high school English teacher and his Rabun Gap, Georgia students, an archive of these valuable oral traditions of Appalachia has been created. It began when the students interviewed local residents for a publication called Foxfire Magazine. The students chose the title for the story it tells. Foxfire is a tiny organism that glows in the dark and is frequently seen in the shaded coves of the mountains (The Foxfire Book [Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1972], 11). The goal of the magazine was to shed light on a part of American history that has been left in the dark for too long. The magazine was first published in 1968, and eventually the articles were printed in a series of books, again titled The Foxfire Book. These valuable archives of Appalachian history were turned into a stage play, Foxfire, by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. The play premiered at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1980. From there, it moved to the Guthrie Theatre in 1981, and in 1982 it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway where is ran for 213 performances. The play received three and two Drama Desk Awards. Foxfire tells the story of Annie Nations’s journey as she moves away from the land and her past toward her family and her future. The play uses poetic realism to disclose the values and traditions of a bygone world to a contemporary audience. The tale is set on an Appalachian farm, called Stony Lonesome, and a sense of place dominates the play. Foxfire is a play about passages: birth, marriage, death, burial, and the afterlife. Music is central to the story-telling in the play, just as music was central to the folk tradition of the Appalachian Mountains. The primary character, Annie Nations, lives alone on a remote farm. It is likely that Aunt Annie, as she is called, is based on an actual woman, named Aunt Arie, who is featured in the first Foxfire Book (The Foxfire Book [Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1972], 17-30). Arie lived alone in a log cabin in the Appalachian Mountains, with no running water, a small fireplace, and her dead husband’s clothes hanging in her room. When the students interviewed Arie, she was preparing a hog’s head for souse meat, and she asked the visitors to help. Just like her counterpart, Annie is still deeply tied to the past

Utah Shakespearean Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 and her dead husband, Hector. Annie keeps Hector’s clothes hanging up and ready to wear, and his tools under the bed. When we first meet Annie she is preparing souse meat, and she asks her visitors for help. It is evident that a sense of place dominates the play. Appalachian literature is often distinguished by an emphasis on place and setting, which influences the motivations and values of the characters (A Handbook to Appalachia [Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2006], 199). The stage directions at the start of act one dictate that, “The stage is dominated” by the range of Blue Ridge Mountains in the background (Foxfire [New York: Samuel French, 1979], 7). Annie’s late husband, Hector, serves as a representation of the past and the strong connection that people had to the land. Hector claims his burial caused an apple tree to flourish. “The year after they put me down I had that ol’ apple tree bloomin’ like the finest spring” (91). The land values Hector, and Hector values the land. He tells us “y’ can’t put a price on dirt any more than you can put a price on a man’s life (90). Hector believes that if a man takes care of the land, the land will be take care of him. “Well, like m’ daddy used t’ say, y’ jus’ keep ploughin’ an’ plantin’ an’ the Lord’ll take care of the rest” (37). When Hector meets his grandson, he makes a point of taking the boy to plant a tree so that Heckie will have “roots” on the family land (59). Until the very end, Hector dominates the play, and his advice is the only advice that Annie will listen to. Annie also has a special connection to the land. She comments that she had children for the Lord’s sake and for “this place” saying “What else is there? Fam’ly’s gotta have a place” (59). Although Foxfire is a play that heralds traditions and a respect for the past, it is primarily a play about transitions, and particularly Annie’s journey. Through flashbacks, the audience is able to experience the most significant moments in Annie’s life: Dillard’s birth (36–43), Hector’s proposal (61–63), and Hector’s burial (85–90). Throughout most of the play Annie engages with Hector as if he were still alive, and her connection to the past and her home seem impenetrable. Annie’s views begin to shift when she discovers that she has to choose between her family and her “place.” Hector tells her that Dillard and the grandkids are “growin’ someplace else. You an’ me was planted here.” Annie then asks, “Place ‘r family. That the choice?” (76). Annie comes to realize that in the modern world, these two things don’t always connect, and that a place needs a family perhaps more than a family needs a place. Annie finds that holding onto a “place” may not be worth losing valuable time with her living family members. “To everythin’ there is a season—a time t’ be born an’ a time t’ die—a time t’ pick up that which is planted” (77). True to the Appalachian tradition of oral history, in the play Foxfire the story of the Nations family is told through Dillard’s music, and performances of significant past events. Dillard tells the story of his father’s successful trading career through music (45–46), and other key events in the Nations family history are performed in flashbacks. It is significant that act one both begins and ends with Dillard singing “My feet took t’ walkin’,” (9). Dillard represents the next generation of the Nations family and it is his responsibility to keep his family’s memory alive through presentations of oral history. By the end of the play, every member of the Nations family, except Hector, has walked away from Stony Lonesome, leaving the past for an uncertain future. Stories found in archival histories like Foxfire have a lot to teach us about the survival of the human spirit. It is a way for younger generations to revisit the repertoire of a culture that was almost lost. These stories can teach us about the strength of human interdependence in a world without modern conveniences like cars and the internet. During the Industrial Revolution, much of America turned from homegrown foods

10 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 and products to factory goods. Simple home entertainments and stories of family history were traded for professional entertainment and stories that were largely impersonal. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the traditions of the American frontier. Natural foods and alternative medicine rooted in the homegrown remedies of the frontier have become all the rage. Folk artists, who often simply engage in activities that were once commonplace on farms, have begun to be seen as national treasures. There are several festivals across the country that celebrate folk arts and the traditions of our country’s founding civilizations. Perhaps this movement began as a response to the limitations of the urban lifestyle. The loss of traditional neighborhoods and sense of community has left Americans to search for a meaningful tie to the past. By experiencing the journey of Annie Nations, perhaps we can learn to embrace the traditions and values of the past, while still moving into the future.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 11 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880