Dividing the Estate

After an Off-Broadway run last year, Horton Foote's "Dividing the Estate" has been tuned up and shined up as a Broadway production. NY Times drama critic Ben Brantley applauds the result. He finds Foote's portrayal of a haute-bourgeois Texas clan squabbling over an estate to be dead on:

Literature is filled with people who find greatness in crisis. Mr. Foote’s strength lies in drawing characters, with a gaze as clear and fresh as spring water, who remain as doggedly small as they always were.

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[Hallie] Foote, the playwright’s daughter and frequent interpreter, makes Mary Jo a figure worthy of Molière, a small-boned, ineffective though tenacious bird of prey with ravenous eyes and a jutting neck. When it comes to dividing the estate, leave it to Mary Jo to say bluntly what’s really on everyone’s mind: “I want everything — what about you?”

By serendipitous coincidence, the family turmoil has been intensified by . . . a real-estate bust.