"The Trip to Bountiful" at the Goodman Theatre on March 10th. Chicago, IL.

I was interested in seeing this show largely because it was written by a Southerner and because Lois Smith is in it. As a student of southern literature, I couldn't pass up the chance to see a Horton Foote play and the only scene in "Minority Report" worth seeing was the scene with Lois Smith in the greenhouse. At the same time, I was prepared to be somewhat bored. This was to be a straightforward production of a play written in 1953, about three or four years after Ionesco's far more experimental "The Bald Soprano."

This terrific production totally won me over. The direction focused on the script and the acting. In Goodman productions, the art direction, especially the sets, can be a bit much. In this case, the set took back seat and for that I'm grateful. Lois Smith's performance was as wonderful as I'd expected. Meghan Andrews, who plays Thelma, a young woman whose husband has left to fight in WWII and who shows great kindness to Carrie, is also especially great to watch.

The story is about an old woman who has left her family farm in the dying town, Bountiful, and lives with her son and daughter-in-law in Houston. She longs to go home but she is old and her son insists she stay in Houston with him. As time goes on, Carrie recalls her memories of Bountiful while her son blocks them out. We are never told what happened in their past but one assumes that something painful did because the son has suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife is afraid for him and refuses to consider entertaining the notion of the mother going back to Bountiful. One day, Carrie sneaks out and takes a bus back to Bountiful with no food, a few coins, and pension check no one will cash. On the way, she encounters a series of people who could easily be indifferent to her but her humanness and will win them over. There's an especially wonderful scene set on the bus in which Carrie and Thelma talk about their situations and we witness their care and kindness for each other. Things in Bountiful don't turn out quite the way Carrie had hoped but they turn out ok. She gets to see the homestead one more time and decides that has to be good enough. The son, in chasing after his mother, comes to the farm and invites the memories of his boyhood for the first time, something that seems to offer a kind of freedom to him.

"The Trip to Bountiful" is concerned with two things, the lost of the agrarian past to the isolation of modernity and the importance of reckoning with the past. This production brings nothing new fangled to the play and is all the better for it. What it does bring is deep emotion to a lovely story and some of the best acting I've seen recently on a Chicago stage.