7 March 2003: Foote, The Trip to Bountiful
Hartford Stage. Alley Theatre production. Fiftieth anniversary production
Rather slow going in the first act, as Foote sets up the situation of a family of three, the childless couple Ludie and Jessie Mae Watts and Ludie’s old mother, Carrie, living in Houston in a two-room apartment, as Ludie gets back on his feet after a two-year illness. Carrie is strong-minded and wily, and she yearns to go back to Bountiful, where she was born, grew up, and had her family, of which only Ludie has survived. Carrie has secreted her pension check from Jessie Mae, planning to use it to finance a trip back to Bountiful to see her one remaining friend and the house she used to own and live in. She escapes on a bus, is befriended by Thelma, a young woman whose husband has been shipped overseas and who is going to stay with her parents until he comes back. The kindly sheriff of Harrison also befriends her and takes her to her old house in Bountiful. Her son and his shrewish wife arrive to take her back to Houston, and, having recovered the “dignity” she sought in revisiting the past and standing in her house once more, she agrees to Jessie Mae’s list of peremptory demands. They return to Houston.
Such is the low-key, almost intrigue-less action that makes up this somewhat Chekhovian comedy, whose dominant tone is wistfulness, punctuated by Jessie Mae’s grating nasality and her feckless husband’s low-grade depression. Close scrutiny of the everyday for what it yields in the basic truths of human existence is Foote’s strong suit. The pace picks up some in Act II, as Carrie’s strength of will and determination to get what she wants take her further than the $3 .50 bus ticket she buys with nickels and dimes at the Houston bus station ever could. What is partly Chekhovian about this play is its frame of an arrival, a sojourn, and a departure; Foote’s variation on that plan is to show us an opening sequence based in exile and a yearning to return to roots, to origins — a kind of first inverse corollary to the plan of, say, Three Sisters. But it is un-Chekhovian in focusing on a single protagonist, and even more deeply un-Chekhovian in its realization of a kind of happiness, a sort of fulfillment and content, in place of the sense of irremediable loss that echoes with the sound of the axe and breaking string at the end of The Cherry Orchard and the military band at the end of Three Sisters. Foote is no ironist, nor is he a sardonic humorist, like Chekhov; but he is a master of local color whose long view of family and generational cycles prevents his play from dissipating its considerable élan in maudlin sentiment. The end of the play occurs in the early hours of the morning (the lighting made it look like noon, almost, a mistake in tonality that surprised me, considering how careful Michael Wilson, the director, usually is about such things), and as Foote construes it it is the beginning of a new day.
The performances are all go