A Trip to Domino Theatre is Bountiful

A trek to Texas is only a seven minute walk from Downtown Kingston if you’re looking for Bountiful in this remarkable, moving, and ultimately touching production of The Trip To Bountiful, currently showing at Domino Theatre on Church Street.

“Do you want to go to a play?” I was unexpectedly asked this morning. As a self-proclaimed theatre-junkie and musical nerd, I didn’t even ask what was showing. “Yes,” I hastily replied. And that secured my seat, and my Thursday night plans.

Admittedly, though I’ve made Kingston home for over six years, I haven’t had much of an opportunity to seek out local shows. At home in Kitchener, I was groupie for Drayton Theatre and the Stratford Festival (and, truly, any show coming to Centre in the Square); soaking in and soaking up whatever production was currently taking the stage. From small scale to Broadway, I eagerly sought out each performance I could. In Kingston, I was barely here eighteen months before the pandemic snatched the world out from under us.

If all the world’s a stage, then tonight I found myself engrossed at Domino Theatre.

The Horton Foote-penned, and critically acclaimed The Trip To Bountiful was brought to life by director Rachael McDonald. Though re-enacted through Broadway, film, and playhouse stages alike, the story never tires, and the sweeping nostalgia still resonates. An elderly mother longing for her youth. Her over-protective son seeks to keep her still and steady. Her over-bearing daughter-in-law – with spitfire and wit – is determined to keep her minded, quiet, and behaving. (And walking, not running, through the apartment, much to the audience’s delight.)

The two-hour traffic of the Domino stage is set in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Houston. Carrie Watts, frail, unable to sleep, soberly sits window-side under a pale full moon. Her son, Ludie, soon awakens and finds her in her rocking chair, and listens to her wax poetic about her childhood in Bountiful; a home she left behind and desperately seeks to return to. Shattering the reverence of a mother/son twilight moment comes the off-putting, audacious daughter-in-law, Jessie Mae, demanding why the pair are still awake in the middle of the night.

With Jessie Mae’s enigmatic introduction, the story locks into place. Ludie was off work for two years, forcing the family to live modestly while he healed, and was able to return to a new company for a meager salary. Jessie Mae bemoans her inability to shop, spend time at the beauty parlour, enjoy Coca-Cola at the Drug Store, or even have the chance to stop and mourn not ever having children – each of these things holding the same merit in her heart and working in tandem as things she’s rightly pissed off about not having. And as her resentment builds from a life she no longer has, she’s fighting against a mother-in-law; the only thing she has left to try and control. The unhappiness between the three is palpable. The sadness is thick enough to chew. We, the audience, are left to determine who we feel the most sorry for – the sickly mother with the heart condition, bound to her son and his wife; the son torn between his mother and his wife while struggling to support them both, or the daughter-in-law with the quick temper, and the razor-sharp wit, who has found herself confined to a life she didn’t sign up for.

Through the perils of their poverty, we also learn that Ludie and Jessie Mae are afforded their modest lifestyle by the padding of Carrie’s pension cheque, though it has yet to come in this month. Jessie Mae is skeptical of Carrie suggesting it simply hasn’t arrived yet. And Ludie placates Jessie Mae by reassuring her it will come eventually. We are informed that Carrie has a keen sense of running away, and Jessie Mae is convinced by her midnight mood and missing cheque that Carrie may be hatching a scheme to disappear again – causing further strife, annoyance and frustration for the couple.

Is it intuition or the consistency of occurence that Jessie Mae is correct in her assessment? As she leaves for Coca-Colas with a friend the following morning, Carrie makes her escape.

The premise of the play isn’t new. The fascination of recapturing youth; the risk of stepping back to step into what you used to know is a sacrifice worth making. The Trip To Bountiful personifies the desire to drink from the well of eternity. Looking back with fondness on the times that were easier, or simpler, or free from the cage of the life we created by accident. What Carrie wants is a moment; a chance to recapture a fleeting flicker of the life she left behind. And through her travels to reach her destination – both literally and metaphorically – we unearth layers of her life, learning who she was, who she became; both why and why not. It’s a journey to both discovering acceptance, and discovering who we can be even if it wasn’t what we’d hoped or planned.

Inside the Domino Theatre, Sandi Cond breathes life into Carrie Watts. You’re transfixed on her deliverance of Carrie’s story. You believe her anecdotes, her stories, her woes and her wants. She refuses to be a sluggish, elderly woman trope. Instead, she is a defiant, headstrong Senior with one particular goal, and she’s unafraid to try, and she’s unafraid of defeat. Cond is emotive; completely dissolving into Carrie Watts. Bryan McDonald holds his own against Cond, executing Ludie Watts as a tormented son and husband, desperately searching for the right thing to say. His heroism shines in the final act. McDonald refuses to allow Ludie to lay at the mercy of the two women he’s caught between. He is just, and yet just a human. McDonald serves Ludie’s purpose – to want, to feel, to feel poorly, to surrender, to do what’s right, and to do it while feeling everything all at once. And just as Cond and McDonald work cooperatively in their mother/son dynamic, Ann-Marie Bergman steals her scenes as Jessie Mae like a freight train; a lightning bolt from an assuming sky. Were we prepared for the somber opening to be seared by the sheer magnitude of a character as that of Jessie Mae? Bergman startled the audience with her roaring rendition of the loud-mouthed, hip-checking, dominating wife and daughter-in-law. Her monologues were one Ouiser away from a Steel Magnolias remake, and the audience gobbled it up and came back for seconds.

The supporting cast followed suit; charming, humourous, and offered our leading characters the opportunity to further expand on who they are, and who they’d become as people. We delve into an entire thesis on Carrie Watts from her bus ride alone.

A highly recommended work of artistic fashion, currently showing at Domino Theatre until February 3rd. Go in without expectation, and leave with the feeling that you, too, are one day going to expect your own trip back to wherever your Bountiful is.

– c xx

Domino Theatre: The Trip To Bountiful