STAGE WEST: "The Trip to Bountiful" at Lamb's Players Theatre

:Lauren King Thompson (left) and Deborah Gilmour Smyth in "The Trip to Bountiful." Photo by JT McMillan

            These days kindness is in very short supply.
            But it’s there in Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” which Lamb’s Players Theatre is staging for the first time in more than 30 years. The fearless and determined journey that the elderly Carrie Watts makes from the unhappy Houston home she lives in with her devoted son and self-absorbed daughter-in-law from to her roots in fictional Bountiful, Texas, is made easier – and more tender for her, and for the audience – by the assistance of a fellow passenger on the bus and by a small-town sheriff.
            Carrie is a woman really without guile, and though she resides in an idealized past of cotton fields and chirping birds and big, blue skies there’s no blaming her for that – the present, in the company of a domineering daughter-in-law and a kind but spineless son, is without comfort.
            Lamb’s Associate Artistic Director Deborah Gilmour Smyth portrayed that unsympathetic daughter in law, Jessie Mae, when the company produced “The Trip to Bountiful” for the first time in 1991 in Lamb’s’ pre-Coronado days. Then, as now, Foote’s 1953 classic enjoyed the subtle direction of Robert Smyth, Lamb’s’ artistic director.
            Gilmour Smyth continues to prove one of the San Diego theater community’s most affecting, intuitive and tireless actors. Just a few months after delivering such a performance as a woman descending into dementia in Backyard Renaissance’s “The Waverly Gallery” she brings to the Lamb’s stage a Carrie Watts such as Foote must have intended, a woman of grit and spirit aching for inner peace and for home. 
            The trick to producing “The Trip to Bountiful” as I see it is to avoid sentimentality. The combination of Gilmour Smyth’s nuanced performance and a decidedly more minimalist staging allows the quiet moments of the play (and there are many of them, mostly between Carrie and her son, beautifully played by Andrew Oswald, and between her and fellow bus passenger Thelma, a very good Lauren King Thompson) to sink in.
            The noise is generated, as written, by the domineering Jessie Mae Watts. Kelsey Venter generates plenty of that, but also the kind of nervous laughter that comes with encountering a character so wholly without understanding for spouse, or certainly for mother-in-law. Jessie Mae treats Carrie like a child whom she can bully.
            Lance Arthur Smith’s turn as a sheriff with a heart is brief but memorable, while Spencer Gerber makes the most out of an obliging ticket agent.
            The integrity of Foote’s play, so fully realized at Lamb’s, is its power to make us “see” Bountiful in all its faded beauty and desiccated dreams. When Gilmour Smyth’s Carrie looks to the rafters at the sound of her beloved birds we can believe they are treetops hovering over a town-gone-by in the Texas nowhere.
            “The Trip to Bountiful” runs through March 1 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.