The Trip to Bountiful – Review by Ben Bustillo ©

 Prohibited its reproduction

I have to admit without shame or fear that it brought tears to my eyes. This is a story that lives in many of us regardless of the color of our skin, nationality or the language you speak. It is about a soul, a love, a house that could have been placed in any corner of any small town around the globe, with the same ingredients of remembrance, nostalgia and a very special place on a sacred altar of our memories.

Let’s begin with the author, Horton Foote. As many writers as prolific as he was, he choose not only his hometown (Wharton, Texas) as the setup of the imaginary town Bountiful, but he also used the story of one of his aunts who had been forbidden to marry one of her first cousins combining it with a little bit of his imagination. A story that has been told in many languages and that has touched all races and ethnicities everywhere.

Foote wanted to continue to live after his passing through his writings, and The Trip to Bountiful is a proof that his memory will remain alive for several generations; specially, when is performed by a cast of the stature of Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams, Blair Underwood and Jurnee Smollet-Bell.  All wonderfully brought together to assemble a powerful execution of a simple drama of fulfilling a dream to return to those memories that we embellish for many years of our lives existing only in a relegated drawer, forgotten and with little desires of dusting them off.

Cicely was wonderful from scene one up to the end of her role interpretation. The interaction between her son and daughter-in-law who managed her pension check, freedom and her burning desire to regress to her beloved Bountiful; the perfect image of her father standing in front of her house; her singing and dancing in the small apartment where they all lived together including one at the bus station with Jurnee; and the sequence of one important element through the entire drama, her pension check that was building dreams for Vanessa and Blair, but it was getting lost all the time through the whole presentation, bringing lots of laughs to the audience.

The drama was written with and about white people in mind; the era was the early 1950’s. The performers in the first movie and Broadway presentation were also white; but the adaptation for the movie made to be shown by Lifetime early 2014 as well as the new theater presentations this same year, were and are accomplished by blacks.

The audience on today’s presentation, well distributed between both mature races, blacks and whites, with a very small percentage of Latinos seeing the show, but well represented by the ushers, bartenders and food sellers; in other words, the differential treatment that as much as we like to say that does not exist this century in our society, it is present in every daily moments of our lives as it was in 1950.

Not only racial, but the economic class was very much distinguished among all attendants. The most expensive seats were taken by white people, and blacks were relegated to the less expensive ones. The era of the drama The Trip to Bountiful happened in the 50’s, and the Director of the play brings up at the bus station a sign showing an arrow pointing a way to the white waiting room to remind us of how separatism was in those days. Today in 2014, even though we all sit together in public spaces, the racial division continues to show the prolongation of this bizarre behavior in this 21^st century.

Carrie Watts (Cicely) had the dream of going back to the house where she grew up; to the small town inwhere she wrote many pages of her storybook; listening to the birds singing again brought her memories of his father dead inside his coffin. When she got the to house of her dreams brought by a very nice white Sheriff – technically, this is a mishap because it is very difficult to believe this type of behavior with a black female from a white officer in Texas in the 50’s – reminded me of a poem I wrote in Spanish a few years ago about the small town back in Colombia where my parents were born. Those memories I have had for a while conflicting  with my personal questionings doubting if I let them remain as they are, memories, or go back to the town and replace them with a set of new ones.

But perhaps what happened to Carrie would happen to me when she found out that people she knew were dead, places where she had built memories had been torn down and disappeared as she was told by the bus station attendant where Carrie was held by the Sheriff until her son came to pick her up.

The revival, the scenario and the acting of this superb cast, brought me to some tears of happiness, especially after the last acclamation when Cicely was carried out by Vanessa and Blair. Loved it!