'The Trip To Bountiful': A Revival To Cherish For Bringing Cicely Tyson Back to the Stage

Cicely Tyson and Condola Rashad in 'The Trip To Bountiful'

Music suffuses the endearing new revival of The Trip To Bountiful, on view at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre and starring the indomitable Cicely Tyson as Carrie Watts, an elderly widow bound and determined to escape her stultifying urban existence and return to live out her days at her family home in rural Texas. 

The music comes from many sources:  from Perry Como crooning on the radio, from the chirping of the redbirds and scissortails that floods Mrs. Watts with joyful memories, and, most of all, from the hymns she loves to sing and in which she finds great strength and comfort.  (I don’t know whether this is occurring at every performance, but at the one I attended, many in the audience joined Ms. Tyson in singing one of the hymns; far from distracting, it felt like a spontaneous and transcendent moment.)

Playwright Horton Foote originally wrote The Trip to Bountiful as a teleplay in 1953, during the Golden Age of Television when first-rate theatrical dramas and live televised productions were standard fare. The original TV production starred Lillian Gish as Mrs. Watts, and the iconic actress took the play to Broadway shortly thereafter. Over the years there have been several theatrical revivals, along with a movie (1985) that garnered an Academy Award for Geraldine Page.  Later, in 2006, Lois Smith won a  Drama Desk Award for her portrayal of the same character in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Theatre Company. 

In short, Mrs. Watts has been very kind to actresses of a certain age.  At the time she entered into their lives, Ms. Gish was 60, Ms. Page was 61, and Ms. Smith was 76.  But Ms. Tyson beats them all.  At what has been widely reported to be the age of 88, she grabs hold of the character, the stage, and our hearts from start to end. 

The plot of The Trip to Bountiful is a simple one (the title pretty much says it all), and the play would be most resistant to any sort of fussy production.  Thankfully, Michael Wilson, who has had a lot of experience directing Mr. Foote’s plays, helms the evening with a gentle hand.  The story unfolds without a lot of sentimentality and avoids melodrama during several potentially melodramatic scenes. 

Mrs. Watts feels trapped, living as she does with her hapless son Ludie (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and sharp-tongued daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Vanessa Williams) in a two-room flat in Houston.  The only thing to do is to make her escape and return to her family home in Bountiful, where she intends to live with a childhood friend. 

Along the way, she shares a bus ride and swaps stories and hymns with a young woman (Condola Rashad), loses her handbag with her pension check inside, and spends the night in a bus station just a few miles from her destination. 

It is not difficult to imagine a version of the play in which the final miles of Mrs. Watts’s journey are made in a pine box, but this is an ending that Foote wisely stayed away from in the writing. Instead, he sends a kind-hearted sheriff (Tom Wopat), who has been dispatched to find Mrs. Watts and reunite her with her family. 
  

It is the sheriff who drives her the rest of the way to Bountiful, where she finds her childhood friend has passed away, her family home is in ruin, and the world of her dreams has long since returned to nature.  Still, it is enough that she has made the journey, and she is able to conjure up a sense of satisfaction and inner peace.  When Ludie and Jessie Mae show up, she is content to return with them to Houston, carrying Bountiful inside her. 

The acting company does a fine job all around, mostly performing roles that are only modestly defined and that serve largely as foils to the central character.  Mr. Gooding, who is making his professional stage debut with this production, does seem somewhat ill-at-ease onstage, and when I saw him, he was losing his voice.  Yet I found him to be most appropriately cast in the role of the befuddled Ludie, trying to little avail to be the peacemaker in the constant struggle between his mother and wife.   

The more experienced Ms. Williams, as the self-centered and mean-spirited Jessie Mae, and Ms. Rashad and Mr. Wopat make the most of their parts.  

But, of course, it is Ms. Tyson who carries the play. She is in turn charming, devilish, forthright, sweet, stubborn—and always fascinating to watch.  Whether she is 79, as her official biography has it, or 88, as The New York Times has declared, It hardly seems to matter.  To quote Shakespeare, writing of Cleopatra:  “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” 

Brava, Ms. Tyson, and yet again brava!!!

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A Joyous Revival of 'Talley's Folly' to Warm the Heart on a Cold Winter's Day

What a lovely Valentine’s Day gift the Roundabout Theatre Company has given us with its tender and emotionally rewarding revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1979 gem-of-the-heart, Talley’s Folly, now in previews at the Laura Pels under the delicately balanced direction of Michael Wilson.

It’s not hard to see why Matt Friedman, played here by Danny Burstein with a complicated mix of chutzpah and underlying schlubiness, has set his cap for Sally Talley.  As richly brought to life by a marvelous Sarah Paulson,  Sally is his equal in every way, the only woman in his 42 years who has captured his heart, despite the minor inconvenience of having shown no hint of interest in doing so.  

Matt and Sally are an unlikely pair.  Neither eHarmony nor JDate would think to bring them together, and it is a tribute to the playwright’s skills that, even though we know this story must have its happy ending (Matt assures of this in a prologue addressed directly to the audience), we remain unsure until the very end.  For though Matt—as narrator—draws us into the story as if embarking on a fairy tale, he and Sally are as real as two humans ever to emerge from a playwright’s imagination.

The tale unfolds on the evening of July 4, 1944 and takes place in a boathouse on the Talley family property in Lebanon, Missouri.  The boathouse is the literal “folly,” of the title, a folly being a fanciful structure meant to suggest a romantic old ruin, lovingly created for this production by set designer Jeff Cowie. 

Matt has come from St. Louis to convince Sally, with whom he had a brief romantic fling the previous year, to run off with him.  The distance from St. Louis to Lebanon is under 200 miles as the crow flies, but these two places are truly world’s apart.  Matt lives in a city where he can fit in comfortably as a Jewish immigrant accountant with socialist sympathies.  In Lebanon, though, he stands out like a sore thumb, a “traitor and an infidel,” as he puts it.

Sally, on the other hand, has grown up in a well-situated conservative Protestant family.  She carries a heavy burden of expectations that would make it unlikely that she would get together with someone like Matt, who, in addition to the obvious, is also 11 years her senior, and whose very presence has led Sally’s brother to chase him from the house with a shotgun.    

The audience’s joy of watching these two play off one another is in seeing the gradual peeling away of surface expectations.  Life has left both of them very wary and attuned to how best to navigate their way through the world with a careful projection of an image.  Matt hides behind his humor and charm; Sally hides behind her sense of dignity and professionalism (she is well regarded for her work as a nurse’s aide).   

It is Sally who eggs Matt into revealing his painful family history, which he does in his inevitable story-telling fashion. But the story he tells--one that is quite touching—unexpectedly triggers a strong negative response in Sally.  She doesn’t buy a word of it and believes she is being manipulated, something she will not countenance. 

In due time, we come to understand her reaction, and by the end, Matt and Sally have come to understand one another, and their love is solidified.  But as much as we appreciate our happy ending, Mr. Wilson’s great skill as a playwright is in painting complete portraits of Matt and Sally—and even of the members of their respective families whom we have come to know without having ever met them.

Issues of war, bigotry, unionism, and the constricted role of women are all addressed over the course of a seamless evening.  So, yes, this is a wonderfully romantic story, but there is not a moment of schlock or falseness in it. Talley's Folly is a love story for grown-ups and a Valentine to cherish.

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