Riverside Theatre staging ‘Trip to Bountiful’

“The Trip to Bountiful” takes actors and audiences on so many journeys, as elderly matriarch Carrie Watts seeks to return to her rural Texas hometown.

For 20 years, she has been living with her son and daughter-in-law in a cramped apartment in Houston. They don’t want her to travel on her own, and they have no car — nor desire — to make the trip. Her son left that world behind, to make a new home in the city.

So Carrie, now in her 80s, devises a plan to sneak out and seek her heart’s desire by visiting Bountiful, Texas, once again.

“In some ways, it’s a very simple play,” said Adam Knight, director for the show running Oct. 20 to Nov. 5 at Riverside Theatre in Iowa City. “It's about this humongous need this person has.

“But in telling the story about this one big need, so much comes out about family dynamics; about the need to have a life with dignity; about memory, and how it both feeds us but also is a burden to bear.”

Even though she’s a decade younger than Carrie, Riverside co-founder Jody Hovland was the obvious choice for the role.

“She’s amazing. It’s a tour de force role,” Knight said. “She never leaves the stage but for maybe 30 seconds the entire play. To watch her transform from the Jody that I know — which is someone who's very much in control of her life, who seems so self-assured and powerful — (into) someone who is fighting for that recognition, for that dignity, is really remarkable.”

“I'm discovering her day by day,” said Hovland, 73, of Iowa City. “She is a woman who in spite of living with her son and her daughter-in-law, is extremely lonely and isolated. She has come to think of their little two-bedroom apartment in Houston as a kind of prison, and that she is a captive, because in the 20 years that she's lived there, she has never felt at home. The play is Carrie's desperate determination to return home.”

Homeward bound

But will she recognize that home, or is she viewing Bountiful through the rose-colored glasses of her memories?

“The farther we’re away from it, is it real anymore, or is it imagined,” Hovland said, adding that she can see both generational points of view.

“I was raised in a very small town — in a farming community in Minnesota — and I can really identify with Carrie's deep wish for that place. And sometimes home doesn't even mean family, because family might be gone. It doesn't mean the structures, the structures might be gone.

“But what about that place that has activated such a deep part of your heart? When I was a young woman, I couldn't wait to leave that place. Now when I drive back, the sight of the horizon there can bring me to tears. So it’s a memory of place and what that’s meant to you.”

It’s now the 1950s, and when Carrie left Bountiful in the 1930s, people were traveling by train, and automobiles were still fairly new, Knight said.

“Now she’s living in this city of Houston that has grown tenfold over the last 50 years, and all of a sudden there’s interstates and highways, and there’s no trains anymore,” he noted. “And so part of the fun of this journey is watching this kind of fish-out-of-water figure out how to get where she needs to go.”

The fictional town of Bountiful lies about 100 miles from the city, so about two hours by highway, but in the 50s, it would have taken twice that long, Knight said.

“Think about someone who, when she was growing up, this was an all-day journey, and now you can hop on a bus in the afternoon and get there at midnight,” he said. “And so watching her come to understand how much the world has changed since she’s left is part of the story, too.”

Navigating change

Several other actors play the people she meets along the way, including the ticket agents at the bus stations and her fellow travelers. Some act as guardian angels as she navigates an unfamiliar realm.

“She’s a person who has lived a very isolated life for a long time,” Knight said, “and so going out into a world that she doesn’t fully belong in anymore has its own dangers to it. That said, she's an incredibly resourceful person. Watching her traverse these hurdles is a big part of the journey plot.

“Ultimately, the central relationship, though, is between her and her son, and how they can reconcile this need to hold onto memories but also move forward.”

Her son, Ludie Watts, played by Martin Andrews, was born on the family farm, but sold it to move to Houston to seek an education. Neither one has been back.

“He has memories of the place, but it's not necessarily something that he wants to re-imagine or revisit,” Knight said. “This is a microcosm of how America was changing in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. These very small towns were dying off, and you had a massive shift from rural populations to urban populations. What was gained was opportunity and mobility, but what was lost was a connection to the land and to family history.”

Daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Jessica Link) spars with Carrie and is always admonishing her to slow down — to walk, not run, Hovland said, but that spunk is what draws Hovland into the character.

“What I'm really attracted to is a ferocious strength that (Carrie) has,” Hovland said. “She has an extraordinary amount of energy and physical strength for a woman of her age. But the strength is also reflected in this determination to get back to Bountiful before the end of her life, so that journey is fascinating.

“I have had two really great role models for that: My grandmother lived to 104 and my mother lived into her 90s, and they were both very independent, resourceful, energetic women, and I just try to live up to that.”

New challenges

The tables have turned on Hovland, who finds herself playing a character older than she is in real life. So how does she find her inner elder?

“We’ve laughed about that a lot,” she said, “because, typically, I’m looking at a script and trying to decide whether playing down the 10 years required for the character is something that I can do convincingly. And for this one, it was like, ‘Oh, I get to play up,’ because we think of Carrie probably in her 80s.

“It’s really interesting to just explore that. Where is the weakness in a woman of that age? She supposedly has a heart condition, so how does that manifest itself with a woman that’s as energetic as she is, and as strong as she is?

“It’s a great investigation for an actor,” Hovland said. “You always start with yourself, what you know, what you are, and then this requires that imaginative leap into something less well known. …

“I think the first thing an actor needs to do is throw out any cliche about the age that you're playing, because that is a unique character. And it’s your job to discover what those details are that make up her physicality and her voice, and the way she moves and the way she responds.”

Because Riverside Theatre is so near and dear to Hovland’s heart, going back home there — even though it’s in a new space — is a gift.

She and husband Ron Clark stepped back from their Riverside administrative roles in 2015.

“And that meant casting ourselves out there as freelance artists,” Hovland said. “I feel so lucky whenever I’m invited to work there again. It’s just a privilege.

“I used to fantasize about being a guest artist at Riverside Theatre, because as the artistic director, I knew what a great opportunity that was, and I wanted that time in my life where I was mainly focused on the art and not the administration.

“And here I am. It is just a joy to come back as a performer — or whatever role — and to collaborate with wonderful artists. And this time, under Adam’s terrific leadership, it's just a privilege. I just pinch myself.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com