- from Timothy Douglas, director
The Trip to Bountiful remains one of my all time favorite plays, and has been on my director’s wish list for some time.
Over the years I’ve had the great blessing of working the preeminent African-American actress Lizan Mitchell, for who, like many artists of her talent, experience, and maturity, challenging roles are far and few between. While she and I were working on August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean recently, I had the brainstorm of what a powerful union could be made between Lizan and Horton Foote’s Carrie Watts … it felt so right!
Equal to my intent of providing a moving theatrical vehicle for Lizan Mitchell is my desire to honor the prolific and uniquely American playwright Horton Foote. And given his recent passing, I felt the timing to uniquely honor him couldn’t be more appropriate.
I went to work combing through the script while visualizing the idea to have the story told from an African-American perspective, at which point this seminal play immediately revealed deeper (dormant) resonances as a direct result of the cultural and social specificities my production would explore. While remaining faithful to the script’s original intent, we’ll also be shedding some light on the heretofore little known black middle class in 1940s Houston, alongside the more commonly understood paradigms of rural Texas life.
Because I remain committed to the playwright’s original intent, all of the augmented socially-specific examples will only be communicated by way of the stage picture, coupled with the audiences’ individual and collective knowledge of race relations.
Ludie’s urgent concern for his elderly mother’s safety takes on an entirely different meaning when Carrie Watts is a black woman traveling alone by bus in the pre-Civil Rights South. And further, in our production, it is understood that she and her impromptu traveling companion, Thelma, are relegated to riding in the back of that bus. No dialogue will be changed, nor will the acting be anything other than naturalistic. Even still, this production will I hope impart powerful new meanings in a unique Trip to Bountiful.
[...] Douglas writes on the Cleveland Play House’s blog, The Trip to Bountiful had been on his director’s wish list for a long time. Although it was [...]