Professor Gil Cates Directs "A Death in the Family"

James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Novel

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

on Exxonmobil Masterpiece Theatre’s AMERICAN COLLECTION

Monday, March 25 at 9pm on PBS

A happy family faces the ultimate tragedy in James Agee’s poignant Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, airing on ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection, Monday, March 25, 9 to 10:30pm on PBS (check local listings).

Now in its second season, The American Collection is an acclaimed new series featuring the best in American drama from the producers of ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre. Previous productions have included works by Langston Hughes, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, and Henry James.

Based on a childhood tragedy that haunted Agee throughout his life, A Death in the Family explores the effect of a shattering death on a tight-knit family in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the summer of 1915. “The book is chiefly a remembrance of my childhood, and a memorial to my father,” Agee wrote.

Directed by Emmy and Academy Award-winner Gil Cates (The Academy Awards, I Never Sang for my Father), A Death in the Family stars Annabeth Gish (The X-Files) as Mary Follet, John Slattery (Ed) as her husband, Jay, and Austin Wolff as their seven-year-old son, Rufus, a stand-in for Agee who was called by his middle name, Rufus, as a child. Also starring is James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential, Citizen Baines) as Mary’s compassionate father, Joel Lynch.

The Follets lead an idyllic middle-class life, troubled only by a low-level conflict between Mary’s Catholic piety and Jay’s love for innocent pleasures, such as a dapper hat, an occasional drink, and outings with Rufus to see Charlie Chaplin movies.

Rufus, naturally, takes his father’s side.

Their secure world comes crashing down when Jay is killed in a freak auto accident on his way home from a pointless errand to see his father, who mistakenly believes he is dying.

First comes a late-night phone call, summoning a “man that’s kin” to “a serious accident” involving Jay, with no details given. Next is the long wait for Mary’s brother Andrew (David Alford) to return with the dreaded news. Last is the coming to terms with the reality and emotional repercussions of Jay’s death. One unexpected trauma is that Mary’s church refuses to perform the full burial rites since Jay was never baptized.

Agee contrasts the mystery and wonder of death as experienced by Rufus with the grown-ups’ more complex reactions. Anger by Andrew at the priest and church. Guilt by Jay’s drunkard brother, Ralph (Christopher Strand), who beckoned Jay to his fatal appointment. Vindication by Aunt Hannah (Kathleen Chalfant, Wit) because now someone else is suffering as she has. Determination by Mary to accept her faith uncritically—in spite of the Church’s failure to offer its full comfort—and to sweep Rufus into its smothering embrace—which is exactly what happened to the young Agee.

Agee was an astonishingly vesatile writer who excelled in genres from non-fiction, with his Depression-era epic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to Hollywood screenplays, most notably with The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.

A Death in the Family was his only novel, discovered unfinished among his papers when he died suddenly from a heart attack at age 45 in 1955. Few of his friends knew he was working on it.

Editors pieced together the manuscript to reveal what critic Alfred Kazin called ‘‘an utterly individual and original book’ one of the most deeply worked out expressions of human feeling that I have ever read. ‘

Journalist Dwight Macdonald observed that his old friend Agee “felt himself so deeply and simply part of the world of his characters“that he wrote about them as naturally as Mark Twain wrote about the people of Hannibal.”

A Death in the Family is a production of ALT Films for ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection. It was produced by Dennis E. Doty, and co-produced by Ronald Colby. The director is Gil Cates (I Never Sang for My Father, After the Fall). It was adapted by Robert W. Lenski from the novel by James Agee. The executive producers for ALT Films are Marian Rees, Anne Hopkins, and Stephen Kulczycki.

The series of nine films in ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection are produced by WGBH Boston and ALT Films. Rebecca Eaton is the series executive producer. Major funding is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS. National corporate sponsorship is provided by ExxonMobil.

ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection is closed captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers by The Caption Center at WGBH. A special narration track is added to the series by Descriptive Video Service (DVS), a service of WGBH to provide access to people who are blind or visually impaired. The DVS narration is available on the SAP channel of stereo TVs and VCRs. For in-depth information about American Collection, visit the series web site at www.pbs.org/masterpiece/americancollection and the educators’ web site at ncteamericancollection.org. The educators’ web site, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, represents a collaboration of thousands of teachers in high schools and junior high schools nationwide.

WGBH is America’s preeminent public broadcasting producer. More than one-third of PBS’s prime-time lineup and companion web content as well as many public radio favorites are produced by WGBH. The station is also a pioneer in educational multimedia and in access technologies for people with disabilities. For more information visit www.wgbh.org.

Keywords

"gil cates" 

Share This

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Delicious

Permalink