Posted: Feb. 15, 2015 at 12:12 p.m.

“The Trip to Bountiful” is a journey to dignity, a search for a place in this world that transcends the day-to-day sorrows and grayness of a life filled with bickering and smallness.

What a Do Theater is producing this Horton Foote drama featuring Susan Kernish as Carrie Watts, an elderly woman living with her son and daughter-in-law and longing to get back home to Bountiful, a once prosperous town that has become a ghost town after the Great Depression and World War II.

Set in the 40s, the play opens in the Watts’ three-room apartment, a stifling place where mother and daughter-in-law clash and heap small indignities upon each other. Betsy King stampedes over everyone with her demands, constant chatter and her insistence that things be done her way. She has gentle moments with her husband, Ludie, played by Troy Randall Kilpatrick, but is all harshness with her mother-in-law.

Kernish is the central figure of this drama and travels a clear arc, showing how Carrie changes from beginning to end in her search for who she used to be and a way to lift herself out of the daily indignities heaped upon her by her daughter-in-law. She starts out responding in a petty fashion, even her physicality shows a woman who is surrendering to small-mindedness in the beginning. It makes her eventual journey all the more powerful when she finally finds her dignity and realizes what she needed beyond a mere change in environment.

It isn’t possible, she learns, to go back to how things were, but one can be a part of something larger than oneself and find a way to get along. The Carrie Watts at the end of her trip is very different from the one who first started out. Kernish makes clear that the journey is a spiritual one as well as a physical one.

While there are strong performances throughout the show, particularly by Kernish and King, the pacing is slow. Director Randy Wolfe allows for so many tears on stage that there were none left for the audience to shed. There are moments that need a more subtle touch as the heaviness simply weighs and slows things down rather than contributes to drama of the production.

This is especially true in Kristin Marie Stelter’s performance as Thelma. She has a beautiful stage presence and a clear, crisp voice. She is one of the few characters who is sympathetic and likeable from start to finish. But she wears her sorrow so blatantly that one is certain it hid some other secret than what the text supports. It is too great and too present for what Thelma is going through and her attitude bespeaks a person in mourning for one dead, not one who is absent and in danger.

Michael Andres as the ticket agent provides some comic relief and both James King’s Roy and Scot Whitesell’s Sheriff provide characters who are upbeat and helpful.

As always, the sets in the What a Do production are excellent, highly functional, and able to quickly change to different locations. Samantha Snow’s designs are both functional and artistic, letting the stage easily transform from apartment to railway stations to a farmhouse porch. There is one unnecessary change. The two railway stations could have been set the same with a mere change in placard rather than adding more time to the show by moving set pieces around just because it could be done.

Nancy King’s costumes are very fitting for the period and also serve to show an economic difference in the play’s characters: Thelma is clearly more well off than the Watts family. The hats the women wear are also a delightful touch, from the turban worn to bed to the bonnet Thelma wears on her journey, and the traveling hat Carrie wears. As a minor point, it seemed odd that Ludie is not wearing his suit in the final scene of the play since he would be going directly to work.

“A Trip to Bountiful” offers hope in its slow journey, hope that each of us can reclaim our place in an ever-changing world.

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SHOW DETAILS:
“The Trip to Bountiful”
What A Do Theatre
4071 W. Dickman Rd, Springfield, MI 49037
8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Feb. 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28
8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19**
3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21*
2 hours, 15 minutes, with one intermission
$20 (*$10 matinee, **Pay-what-you-can with a $7 minimum, tickets can only be purchased at the door by cash or credit card.)
269-282-1953
www.whatado.org

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