SOURCE: "The Normal Foote," in The Village Voice, Vol. XL, No. 6, February 7, 1995, p. 81.

[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...