Denver Center Theatre Company audiences have been waiting five years, since “Bernice/Butterfly,” to again see actress Kathleen Brady’s talents on full display.
“The Trip to Bountiful” is worth the wait.
Brady’s ferociously humane and even girlish performance as a caged, dying old woman desperate to return to her birthplace, is one audiences will lap up like a bowl of warm milk.
Brady’s done too much, too well in her 23 years at the Denver Center to call this her career-defining role. But it certainly warrants a bookmark in a bountiful scrapbook of indelible stage memories.
By now, most know this play is Brady’s return to the stage after chemotherapy for breast cancer, and it’s impossible for the mirrored journeys of actor and character not to enhance our appreciation for an exhausting performance that is the equivalent of a group hug.
Horton Foote’s problematic “The Trip to Bountiful” is a rug that’s collected a lot of dust (and plot holes) in its 56 years. But director Penny Metropulos (“You Can’t Take It With You”) has a particular skill for stirring a surprising depth of feeling in her audiences whenever she takes such rugs out back for a few loving whacks.
Here she elicits warm performances from characters both sweet and sour, making for the kind of hankie-fetching finale the DCTC just isn’t much known for. Even the acidic here is cloaked in a kind of sweetness.
“Bountiful,” set in 1953, is about an elderly woman who’s been cooped up for years in a Houston apartment with spineless son Ludie (Larry Bull) and his vapid, viperous wife. Jessie Mae, a bored and spoiled asp played with skillful nuance by newcomer Sara Kathryn Bakker, treats the excitable Carrie like a naughty cat who will dart for any open door.
The widow’s ongoing presence in her home is a necessary but paid imposition – the couple depends on her social-security check to make their own ends meet. But the pervading veneer of civility only exacerbates the doleful, claustrophobic tone.
Carrie, weakened by dizzy spells from a bad heart, is sure she will be revitalized if only she can run her hands through the soil of her childhood home in a nearby town. To her, Bountiful means finding her dignity and strength. But Ludie and Jessie Mae stymie her escape at every turn.
And if you’re asking why her otherwise loving son couldn’t be bothered once in 20 years to drive his mama three hours for a visit home, you’re not alone.
Foote’s first act takes far too long, so when Carrie finally makes a break for it, we all feel like we’ve escaped. She then forges a quick but deep alliance with a similarly kept housewife (a profoundly winning Julie Jesneck), and encounters with a ticket man and a sheriff (the ever reliable Randy Moore and John Hutton) provide much-needed levity and additional poignancy.
There are several marvelous ironies in watching “Bountiful” through a 2008 prism. The underlying melancholy of universal “coming home” stories such as these, of course, is that the world the protagonist so dearly wants to come home to no longer exists. Or maybe never did. That’s been true in everything from “The Odyssey” to “The Wizard of Oz” to “Of Mice and Men.”
But to our jaundiced eyes, the sterile, urban Houston that Carrie is fleeing is now the kind of world we kind of twinkle for today. Where men address an elderly woman as “ma’am,” where a lost purse gets returned, where people come to the aid of a stranger in need.
It seems our world is still filled with two kinds of people — those fleeing from a broken home, or those broken for having left an unbroken one behind. But what is home, anyway? Is it the house or the dirt it rests on? Is it the people who live in it, or the town it occupies?
It will be fun gauging how contemporary women regard the play’s ending. While Foote’s intent was likely most evident in 1953, his ending may have a far more unsettling effect on women today, who might possibly see what transpires as anything from reconciliatory to downright tragic.
There are some inherent difficulties in staging this play in the round, at the Stage Theatre. A portion of the audience is missing a key visual in the final scene.
But this is a night, an entire run, that belongs to Brady, who goes about her task with dignity, fortitude and a commitment to purpose. At one point, the beaming actor taps her heart and says to a stranger, “You’ll never know what this has meant to me.”
Now that we all know a small bit about Brady’s own trip back from cancer, I rather think we do.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“The Trip to Bountiful” *** (out of four stars)
Drama. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Through Oct. 25. 2 hours, 40 minutes. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $34-$51. 303-893-4100, King Soopers or
Our interview with Kathleen Brady
Read our interview with Kathleen Brady about her comeback from breast cancer. Also see a retrospective of photographs from her career.
