What is the main conflict in The Young Man from Atlanta by Horton Foote?

In The Young Man from Atlanta, Foote explores grief, religious faith, homosexuality, suicide, race relations, the American dream, and deceit. As Ben Brantley remarked in his 1997 review for the New York Times, Foote is "a sly, compelling quiet playwright" who "operates from the assumption that life is a slow, steady series of unanswerable questions and losses against which there is finally no protection." According to Brantley, much of Foote's work is informed by the precept that "if you don't talk about the darkest aspects of life, then they don't exist." Indeed, Foote leaves much in this work unsaid, and for some, that is its greatest strength.