By Carol Davis
COSTA MESA, California — The trip from my house in San Diego County to The South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County to see Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, took me about 90 minutes from door to door with medium traffic along the way. Carrie Watts’ (Lynn Milgrim) trip from Houston, TX the place she now lives, to her girlhood home in Bountiful, Texas, took twenty years with many detours and lost time along the way.
Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful was originally a 1953 teleplay before being adapted to the stage. It starred Lillian Gish with Eileen Heckart and a young Eva Marie Saint making occasional appearances. It is perhaps best remembered by the 1985 film version starring Geraldine Page (for which she won an Oscar) and it did make it to Broadway for a short run starring Gish before that.
Horton Foote wrote more than 60 plays and films and won an Academy Award in 1962 for his adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird into a screenplay. In 1956 he won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for The Young Man from Atlanta. Foote’s ordinary, home-grown characters doing ordinary, everyday things are a reflection of his own lifestyle growing up in the small town of Wharton, Texas.
Carrie Watts is one of those simple everyday but emotionally stifled women (remember this is in the early 50’s) who keeps everything bottled up and takes life, her losses and her loneliness as they are handed to her.
She never married her childhood sweetheart in Bountiful because her father felt him too argumentative. He picked one that never argued back. She stayed in the home of her parents and lived in a loveless marriage (her husband died young) and buried her first two babies there.
Carrie worked their 350-acre farm until it could give back no longer. She finally took her one surviving son, Ludie (Daniel Reichert is convincing as the sorrowful, weary and somewhat milquetoast son) and moved to the larger city of Houston where we catch up with her and her son and daughter in law, Jessie Mae (Jennifer Lyon is irritatingly convincing yet comical in a snide way).
They all share a small and claustrophobic apartment. They live in shrouded harmony made possible by her peace-making son Ludie, but that could come apart at any moment. According to Carrie there is no space outside to even plant a flower.
There is one thing on her To-Do list that she wants acknowledged by her son and daughter-in-law and that is her longing to go back to her roots and see Bountiful before she dies. She is convinced she will wither and die of loneliness and unfulfilled dreams in Houston if she can’t see Bountiful one more time. Ludie thinks the trip is too much for her weakened heart condition and Jessie Mae is just annoyed in general at everything she does including humming her favorite hymns.
Carrie Watts is like most of us who dream of our glorious childhood days and never consider what twenty years can do to a worn out and poverty stricken town. In her mind’s eye it will look and be the same. So she plots ways to go back home, fantasizes about life there and the possibility of living with one of her best friends (whom she hears from once a year). She aches to set her feet in the soil in which she once loved to till and plant.
High strung, selfish and self absorbed, Jessie Mae is tired of hearing about Bountiful and pretty much puts Carrie down whenever possible but especially when she suspects Carrie of not sharing her government pension check. Jessie Mae relies on that check to do the little extras like sipping Coca Cola with her friends at the local drug store or getting her hair done twice weekly at the neighborhood beauty parlor.
Her son Ludie knows that the amount on the check is not enough in and of itself to sustain Carrie should she leave. But it’s fun watching the cat and mouse game between Carrie and Jessie Mae that skirts around that check.
However, both son and daughter-in-law are afraid she will take the check and high tail it to Bountiful in spite of their watchful eyes. She has every intention of doing just that. She has tried before but failed.
So aside from signing over her monthly check to Jessie Mae (who checks the mail every day) and planning ways to leave Houston if she can ever escape their grip, Carrie is pretty much put in the middle of Ludie and Jessie Mae’s troubles.
The fact that he barely ekes out a living, that the marriage is running on empty and that after 15 years they are resigned to the fact that they cannot have children of their own makes for a situation that saddens Ludie even more, add sticks more thorns in Jessie Mae’s side that she covers up by just being nasty to Carrie.
But like the Little Engine That Could, on this particular day all the stars are lined up right for Carrie as she manages to keep the check, make it to the Greyhound Bus Station and slip aboard a bus heading toward Bountiful before Ludie and Jessie Mae can catch up with her.
Along the way she meets a lovely young woman, Thelma (Lily Holleman is just right as the sympathetic listener) who befriends her and watches over her until they have to part ways. She tells Carrie that her new husband is in the Army and she is on her way home to live with her parents again. Carrie shares with her new friend what her life is like as well as her excitement to be going home to Bountiful
It is here that director Martin Benson and Milgrim shine and bring out the best of this production. Milgrim’s face is a mirror of her feelings (throughout) that has a glow that comes from within that we don’t see when she is back in Houston. There she is tightlipped and anxious. On the bus trip she is simply beautiful, optimistic and glowing as she nears her destination.
She is complete now that she has seen with her own eyes what she left behind even though it is a dilapidated, ramshackle home. She learns that her friend has just died and the land is fallow, and yet she shines. You can see the weight of the world lifted as she walks around her run-down property, but all is now right with Carrie. (Thomas Buderwitz’s set design is perfect in every sense from close apartment quarters in Houston to this huge old house in Bountiful).
By the time Ludie and Jessie Mae catch up with Carrie, who is escorted to the Bountiful homestead by the local Sheriff (Hal Landon, Jr. is perfect for this role) Carrie has had a chance to regain some of the confidence she lost when she left so many years ago.
It is here that she and Ludie manage a singular memory that satisfies both; that of her waking him from his sleep when he was a little boy to marvel at the moon. In past telling of the story, Ludie denied remembering. It is back in Bountiful that they finally come together as mother and son.
Finally, during her short absence Ludie and Jessie Mae must have had some small epiphany and both decide to change their ways toward Carrie if she, in turn, promises never to run away again.
Cricket S. Myers sound design from birds chirping to announcements in the bus station, to long ago favorites like Johnny Ray singing “Cry” on the old radio with sounds of “Tennessee Waltz” on another occasion, to Angela Balogh Calin’s great period costumes (Jessie Mae’s open toe brown and white saddle shoes are classic) to Donna & Tom Ruzika’s excellent lighting design to the overall top notch cast put this production in the must-see category.
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to see this play locally with one of our premiere actors, the late Katherine Faulconer, who played Carrie Watts. I fell in love with the play then and was not disappointed in this current production. Horton Foote’s small town Texas upbringing and understanding of the people there is reflected in Martin Bensen’s carefully crafted direction as the play unfolds in real time.
This coming season, The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego is scheduled to produce the west coast premiere of Foote’s final play Dividing the Estate . Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter (she received a Tony nomination for her role as Mary Jo in the original Broadway production) and his son Horton Foote, Jr. who has been away from the stage for almost 20 years, will be on hand– he in the role of Lewis Gordon.
See you at the theatre.
Dates: Through Nov. 28th
Organization: South Coast repertory Theatre
Phone: 714-708-5555
Production Type: Drama
Where:
Ticket Prices:
Web: scr.org
Venue: Segerstrom Stage