“The Trip to Bountiful”
Written by Horton Foote
Showing: Goodman Theatre, 175 N. Dearborn, through April 6
Tickets: $35-$75
Contact: (312) 443-3800; goodman-theatre.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

The kindness of strangers is usually contrasted to the cruelty of kin, seldom more so than in this still-glowing 1953 gem by 94-year-old Texas playwright Horton Foote. Its very principal character is Carrie Watts, a hymn-singing old lady who has spent the last 20 years living miserably in a small Houston house with her taciturn son Ludie and his bossy, “nervous” wife Jessie Mae. Cooking for and supporting this unpleasant abode with her pension checks, Carrie is forced to eat the crust of humility. But she dreams radiantly of returning to Bountiful, her Gulf Coast childhood home where she last knew happiness and hopes to taste it one last time.

In the opening scene Foote trenchantly conveys the tedium and bickering that Carrie must flee, even temporarily. Trying to come full circle, Carrie’s great escape is as much out of the present—the late 1940s—as it is into the past. Along the way she meets a young wife forced to live with her clan while her husband goes overseas—Thelma becomes a kind of surrogate daughter to whom Carrie unburdens a ton of regret and the hope she calls home. Thanks to a kindly sheriff and a good-hearted bus station manager, Carrie finally sees Bountiful, a town whose name is now a lie: But here’s the only home she ever loved, with the birdcalls she used to know by heart.

Heart is the soul of this unashamedly sentimental script, originally performed by Lillian Gish on television and Broadway, then made into an Oscar-winning 1985 film starring Geraldine Page. Its power is its portrait of a frail but flinty Carrie, vulnerable with age but refusing to abandon the last dream standing, Lois Smith, fondly remembered as Ma Joad in Steppenwolf’s 1988 “Grapes of Wrath,” is her natural. Shimmering with resilience and resourcefulness, she makes old age into an adventure. You can understand why strangers would want to help her and also why loved ones would find her aggravating.

Harris Yulin’s staging features Hallie Foote, the playwright’s daughter, as petty, needy, high-strung Jessie Mae. But this daughter-in-law from hell, with a Texas twang that could strip paint, is as compassionately depicted as everyone here. Though her life has turned bittersweet at best and an old lady seems an easy victim, stubborn Jessie Mae is not so different from Carrie. Her curse is that she lacks a past to want to escape to. As Ludie, Devon Abner (Hallie’s real-life husband) perfectly captures the anguish of a dutiful son bossed around by a Houston harpy. Finally, Meghan Andrews makes Thelma a truly decent soul with whom to travel.