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BORNSTEIN: 'Trip to Bountiful' is a pleasant journey

Star's acting is the high point of the trip home in a play that's seen better days

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 2, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Kathleen M. Brady has become the queen of the cameo at Denver Center Theatre Company. For the past several seasons, her impact has been limited to brief, vibrant bursts of personality, usually in massive period pageants.

With The Trip to Bountiful, Brady is back center stage (literally, in the in-the-round Space Theatre), giving a beautiful performance in a play that, while nicely directed by Penny Metropulos, isn't exactly a fire- starter.

Horton Foote's 55-year-old play is like a large serving of tapioca at this point in history: It's sweet and it has some texture, but if you think about it at all in the days after you go, it will be with respect to the fine performances offered.

Brady plays Carrie Watts, a widow virtually trapped in a small Houston apartment with her son, Ludie, and his wife, Jessie Mae. She spends her days as a virtual servant, under the constant berating of Jessie Mae. All she dreams of is returning to her hometown of Bountiful, on the Gulf Coast - if she can only get out of the apartment with her pension check.

Brady gives a performance of depth and detail as a woman with a honey-tipped accent and nervously wringing hands. In one last burst of gumption, she breaks free of the apartment and heads on the bus to Bountiful.

Throughout her journey, Brady finds a multitude of colors and volumes in this woman, from meek and stressed to ecstatic to genially self-confident. She's at her most effective in a repeated cry, "I wanna go home!" when she is reduced from adulthood to a plaintive child at summer camp.

Despite the appealing performances of Larry Bull as the ineffectual Ludie, Randy Moore as a bus station employee and John Hutton as a sheriff, this is a production dominated by female energy. As a young woman Carrie meets on the bus, Julie Jesneck is the daughter-in-law Carrie should have had, a quiet, kindly presence who says much with few words.

The daughter-in-law Carrie got is played by Sara Kathryn Bakker, who wrenches her face into that of someone biting an unripe persimmon and bellows more often than she speaks. She's a petulant, selfish child, yet she's also understandable as a bored, childless housewife who is thrust into the constant company of an adult she didn't choose.

There doesn't seem to be any aesthetic reason to have staged this play in the round; its story is so much about quiet emotions and they are regularly unreadable by a quarter of the audience.

This is a kind play, an often painful play, but it's a surprising play to open a season with. Denver Center has entered the fall, if not with a whimper, with a whisper.

The Trip to Bountiful

* Grade: B

* When and where: 6:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 1:30 p.m. Saturdays. Through Oct. 25, Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex

* Cost: $34 to $51

* Information: 303-893-4100

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