''The Day Emily Married'' is a play by

Horton Foote Albert Horton Foote Jr. (March 14, 1916March 4, 2009) was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received Academy Awards for his screenplays for the 1962 film ''To Kill a Mockingbird'', which was adapted from the 1960 novel of the same name ...

. The play takes place in the fictitious town of Harrison, Texas, where Foote has set many of his plays.

Setting

The setting is in the early summer of 1955 and takes place in Harrison, Texas. (Southern Texas town, 50 miles southwest of

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 i ...

and 40 miles north of the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United ...

)Sommer, Elyse
"'The Day Emily Married', a CurtainUp review"
curtainup.com, August 4, 2004

Synopsis

A newlywed couple, Emily and Richard Murray, move into the house of her parents. Emily had divorced her first husband. She soon finds herself caught between her seemingly-ideal husband and her family. Her parents, Lyd and Lee Davis, are loving but also controlling. Lee plans on selling his own farm and some property, to help Richard set up a business. "Off-Broadway Cast Set for Horton Foote's The Day Emily Married at Primary Stages"
Playbill.com

Productions

The play premiered at the Silver Spring Stage in Silver Spring,

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

in May/June 1997. It was directed by Jack Sbarbori and the cast included Eugenia Sorgnit (Sadie), Gay Hill (Lyd Davis "Belle"), Stephanie Mumford (Emily), Bob Justis (Richard Murray), Sunday Wynkoop (Addie), Rob Peters (Lee Davis), Elizabeth Lawrence (Lucy Fay), Patty Richmond (Alma Nash), and Marilyn Osterman (Maud Barker). ''The Day Emily Married'' was presented by the Lost World theatre company, Whittier, California, in July 2000. According to ''Playbill'', the play was written in the 1960s but never performed until the Silver Spring Stage amateur workshop, the Lost World being the first fully staged production. The Lost World company had presented a staged reading of the play in November 1998, featuring

Peri Gilpin Peri Gilpin (born Peri Kay Oldham; May 27, 1961) is an American actress. She portrayed Roz Doyle in the television series ''Frasier'' and Kim Keeler in the ABC Family television drama ''Make It or Break It''. She is due to reprise the role of R ...

as Emily. The play opened the

Primary Stages Primary Stages was founded in 1984 by Casey Childs as an Off-Broadway not-for-profit theater company. In 2004, Primary Stages moved from its 99-seat home of 17 years at Davenport Theatre, 354 West 45th Street to the 199-seat theater at 59E59 Theat ...

20th anniversary season. The play opened Off-Broadway at the 59 East 59th Street Theatre on August 3, 2004 and closed on August 29, 2004. Directed by Michael Wilson, the set design was by Jeff Cowie, costume design by David C. Woolard, lighting design by Rui Rita, and sound design by Andre Plues. It starred Estelle Parsons (Lyd Davis "Belle"),

Hallie Foote Barbara Hallie Foote (born March 31, 1950) is an American actress. Life and career Born Barbara Hallie Foote in Manhattan, the daughter of Lillian Vallish Foote and writer and director Horton Foote, she was raised in Nyack, New York and New Hamps ...

(Emily),

Biff McGuire William "Biff" McGuire (October 25, 1926 – March 9, 2021) was an American actor. Best known as Inspector Kramer in ''Nero Wolfe'' (1979). Early years McGuire attended Hamden High School and the University of Massachusetts, where he studied agr ...

(Lee Davis), James Colby (Richard Murray), Terri Keane (Alma Nash), Delores Mitchell (Addie), and

Pamela Payton-Wright Pamela Payton-Wright (November 1, 1941 – December 14, 2019) was an American actress. Life and work Payton-Wright was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Eleanor Ruth (née McKinley) and Gordon Edgar Payton-Wright. After graduati ...

(Maud Cleveland).

Critical response

Elyse Sommer, in her review for ''CurtainUp'', wrote: "The pleasure of ''The Day Emily Married'' comes from the unobtrusive excellence Foote still extracts from that bone and what the actors do with the roles he's written for them."

Ben Brantley Benjamin D. Brantley (born October 26, 1954) is an American theater critic, journalist, editor, publisher and writer. He served as the chief theater critic for ''The New York Times'' from 1996 to 2017, and as co-chief theater critic from 2017 to ...

in his ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' review wrote "Even at its most forced, ''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."

References

;Bibliography * {{DEFAULTSORT:Day Emily Married, The 1996 plays Off-Broadway plays Plays by Horton Foote Fiction set in 1956 Plays set in Texas