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Change drives home 'Bountiful'
Taken from the March 10, 2008 issue of the Chicago Trinbue
By Chris Jones
Harris Yulins exquisite Goodman Theatre revival of Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful" is one of those rare productions that feels like they're closing the book on a play for good. "I can now die," one muses to oneself during the final bows, "without ever needing to see that play again. For I wont ever see it done better."
Lois Smith's take on Miss Carrie Watts, the elderly lady who (to the chagrin of her weak son and domineering daughter-in-law) wants to take one last look at her hometown before she departs this world, is extraordinary mostly because this actress understands that the rural Texan stock of her gal will always trump any inconvenient change in her age.
Far more than Geraldine Page, who starred in the belated but much-admired 1985 movie version of this 1953 play, the fiercely unsentimental Smith plays this central role low in the body, far back in the throat, and deep down in the gut. As first seen at New York's Signature Theatre, this is Carrie Watts as Mother Courage and her titular trip to Bountiful has nothing to do with memory or whimsy and everything to do with raw survival. Theres guilt, fortitude and, therefore, gravitas.
The simplicity of the script doesn't allow Smith to claim full tragic dimension for her restless old woman. But I'll say this. If you can watch Smith's colossus of a character fall victim to the thousand paper cuts caused by the needling and the brow-beating of her self-absorbed daughter in law (played here by Hallie Foote, the author's daughter) without pondering your own fate in your very late years, you'll be doing better than me. "What horrors will someone put me through and how will I survive it?," I was wondering on my lonely drive home. And that's what old Aristotle meant by fear.
But even as the primal Smith is tugging the play away from its author's typically generous view of the world and toward an existential crisis, Yulin is gently pulling it back. And that tension is the source of the production's brilliance. With the help of the designer E. David Cosier, Yulin forges a unrushed series of exquisite transitions that move the story from the domestic realm to a public space to a place of memory. This isn't a simplification of the story, it's an amplification. The usual throwaway scene in the Houston bus station becomes a melancholy nexus of change, populated by a slew of unspeaking travelers and reminding us that whenever you see a bunch of people on a journey, most of them don't want to be going but feel like they have no choice. And as Carrie Watts gets closer to her destination, her way stations become more intimate, marking the central characters desperate search for a renewed sense of self.
The highest point of a show with many peaks is a simple, triangular scene, set in the tiny bus station in Harrison. We see Smith's terrified Watts, unsure of what to do next. We see a ticket agent, played by the extraordinary Frank Girardeau, who uses the mechanics of Foote's polite conversation to show us a decent man who has retreated almost into nothing. And we follow Meghan Andrews, who plays a decent young woman whom Miss Watts has encountered on her journey and who would help her even more, if she wasnt so scared of the world. There was so much going on in that little room on the Goodman stage Sunday night, I didn't want the scene to end.
You can poke some holes in "Bountiful," I suppose, particularly because of that irredeemably awful sister in law, who seems to go too far. But because Hallie Foote lets you see inside her character's fears, it just doesnt seem that way here. And Devon Abner, who plays the wandering womans son, vividly shows us a man so filled with regrets, he can't cross the threshold of his childhood home.
I've found all of this Foote festival surprisingly intense and emotional. Foote's plays are mostly about ordinary, limited people doing their best to keep their obligations to others and stay their own course through the vicissitudes of life. No more. No less. But Footes most important thematic constant has to do with change.
More than any other production of Foote's works that Ive ever seen (and I have seen many), this remarkable show makes you see anew that the world is always churning.
That desire you might feel for a trip back to long ago time and place? Heck, the people back then were feeling lost in their own brave new world and craving their own simpler time, already vanished forever. Life is a just a series of Chinese boxes and a collection of trips without obvious destinations.
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