Raleigh Little Theatre Preview
By Robert W. McDowell
March 6, 2008
In “The Trip To Bountiful,” an aging widow, unhappily living
with her son, makes one final pilgrimage home
Raleigh Little Theatre will present The Trip To Bountiful, a poignant 1953 play by award-winning 91-year-old playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, on March 7-9, 13-16, and 20-23 in its Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre. Foote received a 1986 Academy Award® nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, for the 1985 motion-picture version of Bountiful, in which Geraldine Page gave an Oscar-winning performance as Mrs. Carrie Watts, an aging widow -- unhappily sharing a cramped three-room flat in Houston with her son Ludie and daughter-in-law Jessie Mae -- who cashes her pension check to make one final pilgrimage home in the Gulf Coast town of Bountiful, TX, where she grew up and married and reared her family.
Horton Foote won the 1963 Academy Award® for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, for adapting Alabama writer Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird for the big screen; the 1984 Oscar for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for Tender Mercies (1983); and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man From Atlanta. The original Broadway production of the latter play was nominated for the 1997 Tony Award® for Best Play, and Foote later received the 2006 Drama Desk Award for Career Achievement “for his Bountiful body of work that sensitively explores the human condition.”
Long-time RLT artistic director Haskell Fitz-Simons, who will direct The Trip To Bountiful, says he first heard of the play “probably back in 1985 when the movie came out.”
He adds, “It just blew me away, and I’ve been waiting for my chance to do it. [Bountiful] started out as a TV play with pretty much that same cast [that later appeared in the original Broadway production]. I think it was an hour long. Then Mr. Foote said, ‘I’ve got Lillian Gish,’ so he expanded the script and put it on Broadway.”
The Trip To Bountiful made its Broadway debut on Nov. 3, 1953 at Henry Miller’s Theatre, where it played just 39 performances before closing on Dec. 5, 1953. Directed by Vincent J. Donehue, the original Broadway cast included Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts, Gene Lyons as Ludie Watts, Jo Van Fleet as Jessie Mae Watts, Eva Marie Saint as Thelma, and Frank Overton as the Sheriff, who tracks Mrs. Watts down to bring her back to Houston. Van Fleet won the 1954 Tony Award® for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and Saint won a 1954 Theatre World Award for her performance.
The 1985 movie version of Bountiful, directed by Peter Masterson from a screenplay by Horton Foote, starred Geraldine Page as Carrie, John Heard as Ludie, Rebecca De Mornay as Thelma, Carlin Glynn as Jessie Mae, and Richard Bradford as the Sheriff. Page won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Foote received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
The RLT cast for The Trip To Bountiful includes Ann Lincoln as Carrie Watts, Brent Wilson and as Ludie and Martie Todd Sirois as Jessie Mae Watts, Jessica Heironimus as Thelma, Jake Ferrell as the Sheriff, Todd Culpepper as Roy, and Scott Wray and Chris Gilland as Houston ticket agents 1 and 2. The ensemble includes David Corlett, Todd Culpepper, and Shelly Habetz.
RLT director Haskell Fitz-Simons, who admits to a special affinity for Southern writers, says, “I love Horton Foote’s style. He has such a cadence and rhythm to the language.… He talks the way people talk and not the way grammarians talk. It’s a little difficult to master; but once you master it, the rewards are many”
Fitz-Simons says, “I guess [Bountiful] just resonated in my soul -- this longing for home -- when I first saw it. Geraldine Page just rips your heart out and tromps on it. At the time that I first saw it, I had parents of a certain age [North Carolina theater legends Foster and Marion Fitz-Simons]; and they lived out at Springmoor. I can remember going to the medical center during my father’s final illness.”
During those harrowing visits, Fitz-Simons became aware of the center’s Alzheimers patients, who were drowning in a sea of forgetfulness. “Some of them were preoccupied with the idea of going home,” recalls Fitz-Simons. “But unlike Carrie Watts, they couldn’t remember where home was.”
He adds, “I came to understand that home meant different things to different people. Mostly, it meant that place where I was happy, where I was loved, where I was secure and my family was around me and we loved each other. Carrie’s circumstance is a little different. She’s a country woman who’s been transplanted to the city. In her mind, she thinks what she really wants to do is escape the city and go to her literal home, her family’s house in Bountiful.… She has a journey of self-realization. But when she gets to Bountiful, the house is in ruins; and the town is dead….”
Haskell Fitz-Simons says, “Carrie Watts [Ann Lincoln] is a woman in her Golden Years who lives in a claustrophobic apartment in the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas, literally trapped with her high-strung and possibly hateful daughter-in-law Jessie Mae [Martie Sirois]. I say ‘possibly’ because no one could survive that situation without turning into a worse person -- unless you were a saint on Earth. One night when neither Carrie nor her son Ludie [Brent Wilson] nor his wife Jessie Mae can sleep because they have a particularly violent argument about nothing, about a recipe, … she decides she has to get out of there. The rest of the play is about her trip to Bountiful, which is her hometown, the place she grew up; and she gets closure there and the grace to take the rest of what life has to offer her. By her acceptance, both her son and her daughter-in-law find a degree of grace themselves, where they least expected it.”
In addition to director Haskell Fitz-Simons, the show’s creative team includes technical director and sound designer Jim Zervas, assistant to the director G. Paul Slovensky, set and lighting designer Rick Young, costume designer Jenny Butler, properties mistress Nita McDowell, and stage manager Kerry Sullivan.
“The set is a challenge,” claims Fitz-Simons, “because The Trip To Bountiful is basically a Road Picture put on the stage. Creating the various locales to get from Point A to Point Z is a challenge, but I think [scenic designer] Rick Young has met the challenge. The set is a little minimalistic, but that’s fine by me.”
Fitz-Simons adds, “The costumes are from the 1953 period, but they are not of a remarkable couture. They are work clothes of the most part, Jessie Mae wears some interesting fashions, and they’re not just work dresses. It’s always interesting to put on the skin of another period in time.”
Raleigh Little Theatre presents The Trip To Bountiful Friday-Saturday, March 7-8, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, March 9, at 3 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday, March 13-15 and 20-22; and Sunday, March 16 and 23, at 3 p.m. in RLT’s Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre, 301 Pogue St., Raleigh, North Carolina. $18 ($15 students up to and including college and seniors 62+), except all tickets $10 on March 9th. 919/821-3111 or etix.com. NOTE 1: All shows are wheelchair accessible, and assistive listening devices are available for all shows. NOTE 2: Arts Access, Inc. of Raleigh, NC (http://www.artsaccessinc.org/) will audio-describe the 3 p.m. March 9th performance. RALEIGH LITTLE THEATRE: http://raleighlittletheatre.org/performances/07-08/bountiful.html. INTERNET BROADWAY DATABASE: http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID=8888. INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090203/. HORTON FOOTE: http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=6348 (Internet Broadway Database) and http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0285210/ (Internet Movie Database). THE HORTON FOOTE SOCIETY: http://hortonfootesociety.org/. “WRITING WITH A SENSE OF PLACE” (a lecture by Horton Foote): http://hortonfootesociety.org/.
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