Bounty hunters

It's a trying Trip at Masque

by Steve Vineberg

THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL By Horton Foote. Directed by Sandra L. Buckley. Art direction by Helen Font. Lighting designed by Mary Ellen Moravek. Costumes by Paula Moravek. With Ann Leacock, John Bernhardt, Sarah Francis, Jacquelyn Therieau, and Bruce Church. At Masque Theatre, Milford, through September 26.

Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful began as a 90-minute teleplay in 1953, with Lillian Gish as the disenfranchised widow who leaves her unhappy Houston home with her son and daughter-in-law to make a journey back to the rural Texas landscape where she grew up. (In the brief extant segment of the TV version -- part of a bus ride where Eva Marie Saint is her traveling companion -- Gish, recalling her family dead, is unforgettably moving.) Foote expanded the piece for Gish to take to Broadway later that year, and though the current Masque Theatre production is one of the few revivals the play has ever received, it was filmed in 1985, with Geraldine Page chewing the cardboard-looking sets (and winning an Oscar for her exertions).

Watching the well-meaning production at Masque, I found I'd forgotten almost everything about the movie, including most of the (fairly simple) plot; but I'm sure it must have been shorter than the play. Foote had barely enough material for a 90-minute TV drama; filling it out to two and a half hours of stage time is a disastrous idea, especially since it guarantees you an entire act with Jessie Mae Watts, the mean-tempered, self-centered daughter-in-law, a character you get bone-weary of in about five minutes. The long, long exchange between Jessie Mae (played by Sarah Francis) and Carrie (Ann Leacock), the main character, is not only banal, it's undramatic, and every line of Jessie Mae's gives you exactly the same information about her. There's no way to play this role, so Sarah Francis can hardly be blamed for giving a one-note performance. She certainly tries hard to leaven the proceedings with a little humor, but you don't want to laugh at Jessie Mae -- you want to murder her.

The second act (which contains very little of Jessie Mae) is certainly easier going, but this is a very wet play, and it meanders interminably. The director, Sandra L. Buckley, does good work with the rest of the cast. Ann Leacock is effortlessly natural as Carrie, and (in most of his scenes) John Bernhardt provides some fine shadings for the role of her son Ludie, who loves his mother dearly but lacks the spine to stand up to his domineering wife. Jacquelyn Therieau (in the Eva Marie Saint part, Thelma) has a warm, genuine presence that helps her avoid the obvious trap of falling into caricature (it's an underwritten character). And Bruce Church suggests a deep-dyed tolerance and compassion in the small part of the sheriff who makes Carrie's dream come true and brings her to her old homestead in Bountiful.

Buckley and these actors understate nicely, but since Foote doesn't provide the dramatic shape the play requires, I wish they had taken over the job. The production drifts from episode to episode, and the last scene isn't built at all, really. It also lacks emotional conviction. I could see that Buckley was reluctant to overplay anything in a scene that's set up for melodrama --an old woman returning to her childhood home, which has dwindled down to a broken-down old house and a ruined garden -- and the impulse to play against the obvious emotion is usually an admirable one. But I couldn't tell what the actors were playing toward. The staging in Carrie's climactic moment of catching up with her past is awkward: you can't see her face very clearly (at least from where I was sitting), and Buckley doesn't do anything in the physical placement of the actors to suggest what's going on in this woman's head. As a result, the scene -- and the play -- lacks an emotional punchline.

Foote wrote The Trip to Bountiful just three years before he adapted Faulkner's short story Old Man for TV -- a truly challenging project that he carried off so beautifully that when it was refilmed for Hallmark Hall of Fame last year it seemed even fresher than it had four decades earlier. Presumably The Trip to Bountiful was more affecting in its television format, at an hour and a half; we'll never know. The stage version is about as lively as a bus ride through Texas.