SOURCE: "Nameless Menace in Latest by Foote," in The New York Times, January 30, 1995, pp. 13, 16.

[For many years the chief film critic of The New York Times, Canby is also a novelist, playwright, and theater critic. In the following, he offers a favorable review of The Young Man from Atlanta, noting Foote's focus on the American dream, homosexuality, grief, and family dynamics.]

A menacing secret lazes around, sharklike, just beneath the comparatively placid surface of The Young Man From Atlanta, the sorrowful, satiric new play by Horton Foote that opened on Friday night at the Kampo Cultural Center. The secret is never mentioned by the characters whose lives it threatens to ruin. Having no name, it can't be spoken even on a dare. Instead, it's always referred to indirectly, and with a kind of puzzled Christian innocence that denies the secret's corrosive effects. Mr. Foote's characters say that everything's...