THE STORY: In Foote’s mythical small town of Harrison, Texas, newlyweds Richard and Emily move in with the bride’s elderly and anxious parents, Lee and Lyd Davis. Richard seems like the ideal husband for Emily, whose first marriage ended in a sad divorce. When Richard shows himself to be greedy and untrustworthy, tensions in the already-strained family threaten to cleave parents from child.
“Mr. Foote is a master of the distinctive art of balancing everyday domestic clutter over a pit of existential darkness…THE DAY EMILY MARRIED emanates an infectious, eerily familiar melancholy that keeps pricking at the memory like a wandering melody. I can think of no other playwright who is as harsh in his sentimentality as Mr. Foote is. His plays may radiate the burnished nostalgia of sepia-tone photographs, but he insists on your feeling that there is more ice than fire in their glow.” —The New York Times.
“With THE DAY EMILY MARRIED, [Foote] strikes out in a new direction…absorbing, intermittently comic drama…a strong play…well-crafted.” —New York Magazine.
“Foote’s plays are rarely political in the most obvious sense, and certainly THE DAY EMILY MARRIED is not meant to comment on the lust for oil that has dominated Texas history. But in Richard Murray, Foote sets out an American male who dreams of being 'the number one man.' Intended or not, this look at Texas in 1955 brims with a contemporary resonance in a time of a war for oil.” —Hartford Courant.
