Horton Foote's understated play "The Roads to Home" provides a pleasant journey, but eventually you can't help asking where those roads lead. They provide the theatrical equivalent of a scenic Sunday afternoon drive rather than taking you to any meaningful destination.
Quotidian Theatre Company, in staging a near-perfect production of the play, is living up to its name, and that is both its blessing and its curse. "Quotidian" is an archaic word referring to everyday occurrences, commonplace matters, and the theater company specializes in works that focus on otherwise mundane details of character and atmosphere rather than on stirring plots or stunning visual imagery. Here we drop in on a few lives, observe quietly -- and then go home. Entertaining? Yes. Fulfilling? That depends entirely on your expectations of theater.
Foote, who wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," enjoys a professional relationship with this theater. He shies away from the traditional plot progressions of drama and allows his characters to reveal themselves almost entirely through conversation and in passing interactions with others, usually set in small-town America in the earlier decades of the 20th century.
Quotidian heavily features Foote's plays on its calendar, along with works by Chekhov and other character-oriented writers, mounting productions notable for their realism and attention to detail as they delve into the nature of the human beings whose lives are being explored onstage.
"The Roads to Home" amply displays the best and the worst of this approach. The play is actually a series of three one-act plays, vignettes linked by recurring characters. There is some continuity of story line, but the vignettes are focused primarily on portraits of three Texas women in the mid-1920s, revealing how they cope with various challenges that are, more or less, part of the routine of ordinary life.
In "A Nightingale," two neighbors (Audrey Cefaly, Erika Imhoof) patiently observe a third acquaintance (Stephanie Mumford) who is still reacting to an earlier tragedy by dissolving into insanity. Cefaly and Imhoof, as neighbors Mabel and Vonnie, gently but indelibly create homespun ladies, sure of themselves but slightly nonplused by Mumford's emotionally brittle yet graceful Annie. In "The Dearest of Friends," Vonnie confronts the prospect of an unfaithful husband (Matt Jordan), who has asked for a divorce, while Mabel and her husband, Jack (Ted Schneider), react to the news in their disparate ways. In "Spring Dance," several years have passed, and Annie, who has lost all touch with reality, is institutionalized. She interacts with others who are similarly confined.
Alternately droll and poignant, the conversations among the women and the men in their lives are unhurried. Director Jack Sbarbori allows his cast to linger so that the audience can savor the ambiance of realism created by the low-key performances, the Texas accents and the period costumes, props and music. There is not much of a traditional story arc and issues are not necessarily resolved, so there is little need to gin up artificial dynamics of energy or intensity.
The performances are economical, the actors never wasting a movement or gesture, thereby drawing the audience into the small scale of everyday life.
Sbarbori has said his goal is to create the impression of observing events "over a backyard fence or through an open window," generating the sense that audience members are concerned witnesses rather than impassive spectators. The fascination of this approach and this material is the guilty pleasure of voyeurism, the act of observing others in their unguarded, most natural states.
The drawback is that Foote doesn't harness our attention once he has it. There are no resolutions to savor and no lessons learned. It's a slice of life that may leave you yearning for a larger chunk.
"The Roads to Home" continues through May 15, performed by Quotidian Theatre Company at the Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda. Performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. and an added Saturday matinee May 14 at 2 p.m. For reservations, call 301-816-1023. For information, visithttp://www.quotidiantheatre.org.
