Live Arts Theater’s 2024/25 Voyages Season continues with Horton Foote’s tender and deeply poignant play, “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Sponsored by Charles & Janet Cheeseman and Barbara and Jay Kessler, 16 performances will bring the play to the Founders Theater. The show runs March 21 through April 12, at Live Arts Theater.
Live Arts will host two special events for “The Trip to Bountiful:” an opening night reception following the performance on March 21 and a post-show audience talk-back on April 3. Audiences are welcome to enjoy beverages and concessions one hour prior to the performance and at intermission.
As the production opens, the audience sees “Carrie Watts” sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth. She has been cooped up in a two-bedroom Houston apartment for 15 years with her weary middle-aged son and his wife. She longs to get away, to escape the quarrels and to find peace. Homesick and determined, she sets out on a bus-trip-pilgrimage back to the small town of Bountiful, Texas, a place precious in her memories, one last time.
One of the most celebrated American playwrights of the 20th century, Foote has often been likened to Chekhov for his ability to combine comedy and tragedy in the same moment, to capture the quotidian where nothing seems to happen yet everything happens.
“He has an uncanny way of encapsulating the macro within the micro. The small town of Harrison, Texas, Foote’s fictional stand-in for his own hometown of Wharton, becomes the everywhere. The characters who populate Foote’s plays are just ordinary people, profound in their simplicity, coping with what Foote called ‘life’s vicissitudes,’” Director Susan E. Evans said.
“The Trip to Bountiful” premiered on NBC television on March 1, 1953 starring Lillian Gish. The play then premiered on Broadway in November 1953 and was produced Off-Broadway in 2005 by the Signature Theatre Co. Foote revised the script in 2007 and the play was revived on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in 2013 starring Cicely Tyson. Two films were made, including one starring Tyson.
“ … one of the half-dozen greatest American plays … I’ve never been more deeply moved by a theatrical production of any kind,” The Wall Street Journal said in a review of the production.
Foote authored more than 60 plays and films with a writing career that spanned almost seven decades. He left a legacy as one of America’s foremost storytellers. He was 92 years old when he died in 2009.
Tickets are $28 per adult, $25 per student or senior citizen, ticket for pay-what-you-can performances are sponsored by Ting and are available through the Box Office at [email protected], by phone at 434-977-4177 x123, or online.
Live Arts Theater is at 123 E. Water Street, in Charlottesville.
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Rebecca Barnabi
