Second generation

Hallie Foote: actress, grieving daughter, and curator of her father's legacy. (NY Times)

Theater critics have long credited Ms. Foote as the foremost interpreter of her father’s plays, praising her buttoned-down and unsentimental performances of matriarchs, wives and widows full of frustration and longing. “The Orphans’ Home Cycle” is, of course, an altogether different experience for Ms. Foote. No longer can she look out from the stage and see her father in the audience, his finger pressed to his lips, his eyes often closed, as if listening to the spirits from his Texas childhood — as he once described his experience in the theater to me. Now he is one of the spirits in the Signature Theater, and Ms. Foote is grieving her father through his work.