Thirty-five years later, Lamb’s Players Theatre’s Robert Smyth and Deborah Gilmour Smyth are taking another trip to Bountiful.
Horton Foote’s 1953 play about an elderly woman fleeing her painful present for the idealized peace of her rural Texas hometown was first produced by Lamb’s Players in 1991, three years before it opened its current home in Coronado.
Producing Artistic Director Robert Smyth directed that production, with Jeannette Clift George starring as Foote’s protagonist, Carrie Watts. In that production, Deborah Gilmour Smyth, Lamb’s’ associate artistic director, portrayed Jessie Mae Watts, Carrie’s testy daughter-in-law in the unhappy Houston home Carrie longs to leave.
Deborah Gilmour Smyth stars as Carrie Watts in Lamb’s Players Theatre’s production of Horton Foote’s play “The Trip to Bountiful.” (Nathan Peirson)
In the new Lamb’s production of “The Trip to Bountiful,” Gilmour Smyth is playing Carrie, with Smyth again directing. This cast also includes Andrew Oswald as Carrie’s son, Ludie, and Kelsey Venter as Jessie Mae, plus Lance Arthur Smith, Lauren King Thompson and Spencer Gerber.
Returning to “Bountiful” was in line with Smyth’s desire to “find something for Deborah,” he said.
“Here’s a different voice for her. I thought this would be perfect for her, and to come back to a piece that is amazingly resilient even though it’s delicate and it has an age on it, still feels fresh because the characters are real and so well written,” he said.
Smyth is a longtime admirer of playwright Foote.
“Many people over the years have called him ‘the American Chekhov,’” he said. “He’s so good at natural conversation and at understanding space. He’s a quintessential Southern playwright. If you engage with these people (Foote’s characters) they will move you and take you somewhere and surprise you.”
While saying that the ’91 Lamb’s production “feels like a million years ago,” Gilmour Smyth remembers that “Bountiful” staging well and calls coming back to the play “a real blessing.”
“I feel like I want to have in me as I age a bit of what Carrie Watts has,” she said. “She’s feisty, she’s funny, she’s warm and there’s a sense of optimism in her in spite of the pain she’s going through. Robert’s helping me trying to discover that.”
Deborah Gilmour Smyth stars as Carrie Watts in Lamb’s Players Theatre’s production of Horton Foote’s play “The Trip to Bountiful.” (Nathan Peirson)
This experience is far from new for Smyth.
“She’s (Deborah) a brilliant woman,” he said. “I just need to nudge her and suggest things. We’ve collaborated onstage and she’s directed me many times. Over the years we’ve learned how to work with each other. We’ve got a little bit of a shorthand but also a willingness to stop and go ‘What do we need here together?’”
Said Gilmour Smyth: “People often say ‘How can you work together?’ I think the real challenge is what if we’re not working together?”
For this production of “The Trip to Bountiful” arriving more than 30 years after directing it the last time, Smyth explains he’s “approaching it with different eyes. I hope I’ve learned a few things. I actually have told the design team that I want to do it more minimalist than we did then and let the words carry the audience to the places and the pictures.”
Carrie Watts is written as a strong farm woman. In playing her, Gilmour Smyth, who says she has farm people in her family, is channeling that and the character’s fortitude and self-awareness.
“She’s a woman who recognizes that she is not being who she wishes she could be,” she said. “She sees her faults and her failures and the fact that she’s not as gracious as she wants to be; she’s got some torment going on in her life as she ages.
“She wants to regain her dignity and her strength and her sense of peace.”
‘The Trip to Bountiful’
When: Previews through Sunday. Opens Wednesday and runs through March 1. 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays
Where: Lamb’s Players Theatre, 1142 Orange Ave., Coronado
Tickets: $28-$98
Phone: 619-437-6000
Online: lambsplayers.org