An octogenarian mother still controls the purse strings, her middle-aged children are fed up, and the prospect of inheritance triggers a classic family conflict in Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, which opens on Broadway this month with Elizabeth Ashley as the matriarch and Hallie Foote as the most predatory of her offspring. Although the subject is greed and the catalyst is death (two deaths, actually), the tone is comic in a play that is "poised like life between slapstick and tragedy," as The New York Times put it. "Of all his full-length plays, this is the funniest," says Hallie, the playwright's 58-year-old daughter, who has long been celebrated as a peerless interpreter of his work.

At 92, Horton lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with Hallie and her husband, Devon Abner (who plays her nephew in the play), but family togetherness has not soured their professional relationship. "I love working with her," Horton says. "I look at her with admiration and thankfulness that she has talent. One critic said that she gave a good name to nepotism."

Although he has reluctantly given up driving, Horton—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "around 60" plays and the Academy Award-winning screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, among other films—is now at work on a new play and another screenplay. "I live to write," he says.

"There's a lot going on," says Hallie. "He's also doing yoga—even as we speak."