The Trip To Bountiful is a lollygagging sort of play so perhaps it ought not to be surprising that it feels slow by today’s standards. The play is quiet, ruminative, meandering, fussy, petty and just plain pleasant. Michael Wilson, Horton Foote's oeuvre's principle director, has accomplished all the ordinary, plain as a dishrag qualities that make The Trip To Bountiful by Foote such a memorable play. And this “all-black” production stands the test of universal color/ethnic/race transliteration. “Leaving the land and going to the city and longing for the land and returning and seeing it changed and having to accept that everything changes and adapting to circumstances at every phase in your life and getting old if you don’t die young” is everybody’s story.
Go on and get tickets because you'll be sorry if you don't.
Cicely Tyson as frail-looking, tender, sweet, brave, nuisance-y old Carrie Watts gave, despite a thirty year absence from Broadway, a bravura turn and showed her fellow stars, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams the difference between stage presence and just showing up. She really showed her stage “cred.” Thirty years! Ha! Cicely Tyson managed to look and sound as good at being an old lady playing an old lady as she was, in The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman, at being a young woman playing an old lady. She gives hope to gray heads.
The TV and film stars, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams are good in the roles of Ludie and Jessye Mae Watts the hardworking nice guy and his petty, pretty, mean wife though they are perhaps too soft-toned and intimate for Broadway. They never quite nail that vocal tone that is quiet, piercing, incisive yet audible -- that “carries”. Cuba Gooding Jr. especially seemed unable to project well vocally and, by the end of the show, sounded hoarse. However, Vanessa Williams is a treat for the eyes and her sizzlingly beautiful costumes tell us much about her relationship with poor, sickly, milquetoast, Ludie. I wished that the one or two moments in which Jessye Mae reveals her vulnerabilities had been given more attention.
Oh, but I heard everything and more that spectacularly talented, Condola Rashad said with her voice and her lovely large eyes as the gentle, sprite, Thelma, who accompanies Carrie Watts on the Greyhound bus. Three thumbs up for Jeff Cowie’s bus interior design. Rashad holds her own side by side with Cicely Tyson and handles the production’s most sentimental moment with veteran skill.
This production of A Trip To Bountiful is great -- all you could want -- if you want to have an up close look at film folks. This production is special and memorable if you want to see an actress at the top of her game. The The Trip To Bountiful film with Geraldine Paige in the role of Carrie Watts is and always will be unforgettable. But I promise you I will always remember that Cicely Tyson did Carrie Watts as well. Well done, Miss Tyson.
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