The Horton Foote Prize

Horton Foote

The news last week that a major new playwriting award had been established in honor of the late Horton Foote was hardly a surprise. His reputation as a master of the dramatist's craft had grown steadily over the past 25 years, and this year's posthumous production of his nine-play magnum opus, The Orphans' Home Cycle, on Broadway will only burnish it further. A prize in his name seemed only fitting. No, the surprise was where the award was being established: in Austin, a city to which the Texas writer had no strong ties and in which productions of his plays are scarcer than blue moons. (Different Stages' March production of The Carpetbagger's Children will be just the fourth Foote drama staged locally in 20 years.) So why has this tribute to Foote, which awards $30,000 biennially to "an American playwright who has written an original work of exceptional quality," come from here?

The answer lies with local filmmaker and arts philanthropist Mari Marchbanks, who's been a great admirer of Foote's work since she first saw a version of his The Trip to Bountiful years ago. "I was staggered by its humanity and grace," she says. "His words have a quiet power that strikes us at our core. We don't expect it, we never see it coming, then, bam. We are ordinary, but in his hands, we become extraordinary."

Marchbanks has been wanting to honor Foote for years and thought she had an opportunity a decade ago when the State Theatre Company, then led by Don Toner, was planning to expand into the building just north of the State Theatre. She and husband Greg Marchbanks had the naming opportunity for the small black-box theatre that would go into the space, and she favored naming it for Foote, but then the building ended up being sold, and the space never materialized. Still, the experience gave her the opportunity to meet the playwright at his home in Wharton, and what came out of it, she says, "was Horton's desire to see a playwright taken care of. He told me that whatever I chose to do, to do it for the playwright."

Foote's wish was reinforced when Marchbanks read a McKnight Foundation survey that asked writers how much money they thought an artist needed to live on. "I was surprised," she recalls. "They seemed to ask for so little to get by in order to keep creating, yet the opportunities to make a living with their art are so hard to come by. In late 2008, Greg and I went to New York to see the Broadway production of Horton's Dividing the Estate. Later, in the warmth of our hotel bar, I started up once again on honoring Horton, giving to the playwright, the economy! At some point, Greg cut me off midsentence and simply told me if I was going to do it, then do it. The only way to begin is to begin. So here we are."

The inaugural Horton Foote Prize will be awarded sometime this fall at a ceremony in New York. The recipient will be chosen from submissions made by a select group of resident theatres that share a strong history of producing new work. Each theatre may enter one full-length drama – no one-acts or monologues, and no musicals, translations, adaptations, or collaborations – and the work must be by a writer who's had at least three full-length plays produced by professional theatres. A selection committee will determine the finalists, with the winner being chosen by four artistic directors who all worked with Foote: André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater; James Houghton, Signature Theatre Company; Andrew Leynse, Primary Stages; and Michael Wilson, Hartford Stage Company.

Marchbanks, who is serving as executive director for the prize, sees it as an opportunity "to lift the playwright's financial state while at the same time reminding those and future playwrights of this important writer who came before them. I think that time will bear Horton out to be one of America's greatest dramatists. And in my book, he's second to none."

For more information, visit www.hortonfooteprize.org.