Few shows are as deceptively simple as “The Trip to Bountiful.” Horton Foote’s play is about an elderly woman, Carrie Watts, who’s dead set on seeing her childhood home in Bountiful, Texas, one last time. So she gets on a bus and goes.
The cast is small: Mrs. Watts lives with her son Ludie and his wife, Jessie Mae. On the bus she chats with a fellow traveler, and later she meets a local sheriff.
Not much happens, but Foote was a skilled chronicler of the immaterial elements of ordinary lives: nostalgia and hope, bitterness, friendship and love.
No wonder this first-ever Broadway revival drew a powerhouse cast: Cicely Tyson is Mrs. Watts, with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams as Ludie and Jessie Mae. They share the natural, prickly-but-affectionate rapport of a real family, not hired stars.
Foote originally wrote “The Trip to Bountiful” in 1953 for television, starring Lillian Gish. She reprised the role on Broadway later that year. Foote also adapted the play for the screen in 1985. But you’d never guess the story is 60 years old: It has the timelessness of classic good yarns.
From the get-go, it’s obvious why Mrs. Watts wants to get away: She, Ludie and Jessie Mae share a cramped two-room Houston apartment. The women drive each other crazy, while Ludie tries to placate them both.
Jeff Cowie’s set inventively renders this forced intimacy, then beautifully opens up when Mrs. Watts sneaks out on her adventure, with Ludie and Jessie Mae in hot pursuit.
The reality of this production’s African-American casting hits then, as the bus station features “colored only” lines and pay phones. There, Mrs. Watts befriends a soldier’s young wife (Condola Rashad). Later, the race difference also adds subtle tension with her meeting a gruff sheriff (Tom Wopat).
When the traveler finally makes it to Bountiful, she discovers the house where she had been so happy is an empty ruin. No matter: She’s at peace.
Under the gentle direction of Michael Wilson (“The Orphans’ Home Cycle”), the cast is generally in sync with Foote’s subtle rhythm.
Tyson gives Mrs. Watts an endearing dogged persistence, but misses out a bit on her vulnerability, and even delivers a few slices of adorable-old-lady ham. Yet her hold on theatergoers is obvious: At a recent performance, half the audience spontaneously joined her in a hymn.
Gooding and Williams, on the other hand, triumph over difficult roles.
Williams’ Jessie Mae isn’t a bad person, just someone impatient and frustrated. As for Gooding, his Ludie isn’t so much a henpecked husband as a loving man trying hard to hide his regrets.
He calls his mother “ma’am” the entire show, but breaks down at the end: “Oh, Mama, I haven’t made any kind of life for you, either one of you, and I try so hard,” he tells her. “I try so hard.”
Make sure you have tissues handy for this one.