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| Blair Underwood, Cicely Tyson, Vanessa Williams The Trip To Bountiful Playbill Ahmanson Theatre, 2014 |
You're trapped in a space of misery. You live amongst the ruins of people who don't see you or get you. Your key to tranquility and the utmost peace of God is locked in soil several lifetimes and hours away; hours that might as well be light years from where you reside.
In Horton Foote's, The Trip To Bountiful, circa 1954, Carrie Watts, is an elder who lives with and turns over her periodic pension check to a controlling, nagging daughter-in-law and hen-pecked son. They reside in a cramped Houston, Texas apartment that provides a little more than a window for Carrie to gaze out of and a rocking chair to sway away the pain. Carrie decides to hoard her pension check with the hope that it will one day fund her forbidden trip back to her beloved home town of Bountiful, Texas. *[I only need to touch the soil of the land before I die, so that I may do so with dignity and grace].
The original production of this universal and classically themed piece was reprised on Broadway with a primarily African-American cast. In 2013 the brilliant Cicely Tyson ( Sounder, Roots, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Diary of A Mad Black Woman, The Help) walked away with the well-deserved Tony Award for Best Actress.
When I learned that the play was coming to Los Angeles, I announced to anyone who would listen--my husband--that I had to see it. After all, the final curtain call of the Fall run would conclude on my birthday and tickets to the show would be an phenomenal gift. The thought to see a legend, a master at work, an icon--Cicely Tyson-- was astonishing.
When it comes to the arts, Theater is my first love; I made sure the flyer sat on the table for two months.
