SOURCE: "With Blunt Tools," in New York Magazine, Vol. 28, No. 9, February 27, 1995, pp. 115-17.

[An American essayist and critic, Simon has served as a drama critic for Esquire and the New Leader. In the excerpt below, he offers a highly negative account of The Young Man from Atlanta.]

"Where is the Christopher Columbus to whom we'll owe the forgetting of a continent?" asked the great poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Upon seeing The Young Man From Atlanta, I would not go so far as to ask its author, Horton Foote, to forget an entire continent; I'd settle for his corner of Texas, which he keeps chewing and rechewing: There is a point where mastication becomes masturbation. Do not think the title means that the play is set in Atlanta, or that the eponymous young man actually appears in the play. No, we are again stuck in Texas, the Houston of this...