The Signature Theatre Company, one of the most ambitious non-profit theatres in the city, has done it again. Their history of dedicating entire seasons to the work of a single American playwright continues in a grand way with the local premiere of Horton Foote’s magnum opus, The Orphans' Home Cycle. Several of the nine interrelated one-act plays have been seen previously in New York, but the Cycle is now being presented for the first time in its entirety, newly adapted by Foote himself (just prior to his death in March at age 92) , in three groupings of three plays each, featuring 22 actors playing nearly 60 characters in an epic total of nine blissful theatrical hours. If Part One: The Story of a Childhood is any indication, New Yorkers are in for not just a treat, but a royal feast.

Director Michael Wilson’s production grabs you from the first moment and never lets go. In a thrilling, deftly choreographed coup de theatre, panels slide from side to side and projections swirl as Wilson introduces the three actors who play the cycle’s central character, Horace Robedaux at different ages. It’s a fantastic scene reminiscent of film and television title credit sequences, accompanied by Jan Hartley’s kaleidoscopic projections on a rich scenic canvas of quilted walls, scrims and panels courtesy of designers Jeff Cowie and David M. Barber, while John Gromada’s stirring folk tune evolves into a beautifully dissonant musical suite that would make Charles Ives proud. Gromada’s music is a character itself as it flows throughout the piece, from tunes sung on a front porch to work songs to turn-of-the-century popular numbers played on a parlor piano.

Following a prologue in which an adult Horace Robedaux (played by Bill Heck) has a chance encounter on a Houston-bound train with a woman who recently purchased his childhood home, we flash back to his formative years in Harrison, Texas, circa 1902. As 12-year-old Robedaux, Dylan Riley Snyder carries Act One: Roots in a Parched Ground on his narrow, sturdy shoulders. The seeds of the cycle’s very American themes are sown: the inevitability of change and the search for home as Robedaux deals with his parents’ separation, his father’s death from alcohol and tobacco consumption, and his mother’s new husband who wants nothing to do with him. Act Two: Convicts finds a 14-year-old Robedaux (Henry Hodges) on Christmas Eve toiling for an alcoholic employer at a rural Texas plantation general store while attempting wages to purchase a headstone for his father. Finally in Act Three: Lily Dale, the 20-year-old Robedaux has reached his train destination in Houston where his mother and self-absorbed sister currently live, and where the lonely 20-year-old endures additional hostility from his exclusionary step-father and discovers that he must venture out on his own.

The entire production showcases an army of actors at the top of their game. It’s unfair to note just a few, but in addition to the above Horaces, James DeMarse strikes a tragic figure as an alcoholic plantation owner, Devon Abner presents a fascinatingly chilly façade as the stepfather who wants nothing to do with Robedaux, and Foote’s daughter (and a consummate interpreter of her father’s work) Hallie Foote portrays multiple roles with authority, with the promise of a more substantial part in upcoming installments of the work.

Horace Robedaux, a character patterned after Foote’s grandfather, is something of an everyman, reflecting the experiences of untold numbers of people who strove for the American Dream in the first half of the twentieth century. Part One covers 1902-1910, a relatively sunlit time that nonetheless found Texas still reeling from the effects of the Civil War. Part Two, which premieres in December examines Robedaux’s tumultuous search for love between 1912 and 1917, as Part Three looks at the effects of World War I on his family as they face the future from 1918 to 1928 and beyond.

Still best known as the Oscar-winning scribe of the films To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, Horton Foote has received something of a theatrical renaissance in the last dozen or so years. The Signature dedicated their 94-95 season to his oeuvre; he finally won a Pulitzer for Drama in 1997 for The Young Man from Atlanta; The Trip to Bountiful was revived in a well-received Signature production in 2006; and Dividing the Estate was the toast of the fall 2007 Off-Broadway season and enjoyed a Tony-nominated run the following autumn on Broadway. Big kudos to the Signature for their devotion to this singular American playwright and his work.

As for myself, I can’t wait for Parts Two and Three to find out what happens to Horace Robedaux and everyone in Harrison, Texas as the Signature Theatre continues to present nothing less than New York’s theatrical event of the year. And thanks to the generosity of Time Warner, all tickets through March 7, 2010 are underwritten to the tune of just $20.

The Orphans' Home Cycle plays Tuesday through Friday at 7pm, Saturdays at 8pm, Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 2pm. The show plays at The Peter Norton Space located at 555 West 42nd Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues). For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.signaturetheatre.org or call 212-244-PLAY (7529).