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October 5, 2016

For the women in Horton Foote’s “The Roads to Home,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Cherry Lane Theater, talking is close kin to breathing, and almost as essential to their survival. The three female characters in this plaintive, meandering trilogy of short plays are all displaced persons of a sort, uprooted from the Texas or Louisiana towns where they grew up and where they still live in their thoughts. If they can just keep chattering about events that took place there, even things that happened before they were born — why, then, they’ve never really left, have they? Reheated gossip — replete with animated genealogy charts and catalogs of place names — is their lifeline, while silences are scary vacuums. Home, it would seem, is where the tongue wags. Gabbiness as an existential force is as central to the genteel Southerners of Foote (1916-2009), one of the great American chroniclers of small-town angst, as it is to David Mamet’s foulmouthed urbanites. Directed by Michael Wilson and featuring the wonderful Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter, the Primary Stages production of “The Roads to Home” offers as clear a portrait as you’re likely to find of the significance of loquacity in Foote’s world.

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