Marblehead award-winning actress and writer Georgette Beck plays lead in Mugford Street Players' latest production. Courtesy image
Tonight, the award-winning Mugford Street Players begin a nine performance run of Horton Foote’s moving drama “The Trip to Bountiful” at Marblehead’s Firehouse Theatre.
The play, written in 1953 for live television and the subject of an acclaimed 1985 motion picture, follows the journey of Carrie Watts, an aging widow living with her son and daughter-in-law in a cramped, three-room apartment in Houston. Deeply unhappy with her circumstances, and desperately missing the rural Texas of her past, she believes that if she can somehow return to her old, small-town home in Bountiful she will regain her strength, dignity and peace of mind before she dies.
The Mugford Street production is directed by Pauline Wright of Lynn and produced by MSP co-founder William Smalley of Marblehead.
“In this beautiful and ultimately life-affirming play, Horton Foote has given us a portrait of a seemingly simple woman - one you wouldn’t notice on the street,” Wright said. “But in her quest to find meaning in her suffering and her life, Carrie Watts touches a place deep inside us all.”
The play stars award-winning Marblehead actress and writer Georgette Beck as Carrie, and features John Archer of Danvers, Maureen Bucell and James Robinson of Lynn, Stephen Cooper and Barbara Lasovick of Marblehead, Amy Courage of Salem, and Joy Kasmer of Gloucester in supporting roles.
“The Trip to Bountiful” is, along with “Tender Mercies,” the best-known original work by Foote (1916-2009), a prolific dramatist compared and contrasted by John Lahr, theatre critic of The New Yorker, to his contemporary, Tennessee Williams. During his long career, Foote wrote more than 60 plays and 13 screenplays and won two Academy Awards, for “Tender Mercies” and his screen adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“The Trip to Bountiful” will be performed during the weekends of November 6-8, 13-15,and 20-22, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets are $20 (general admission) and $18 (seniors/students). For reservations, please call 781-631-9106. The theater is at 12 School St. in Marblehead.
