I have not been reporting my progress with A Trip to Bountiful. This is in part because I have been busy, with one thing and another, including but not limited to the preparations for the play, and so I haven’t been contributing to this Tohu Bohu at all. I know y’all have missed me. But also, frankly, because I don’t like the play and have been thinking about it as little as possible. Which is a lot, of course, but rather than snatching moments of the day to impart my insights to you, Gentle Readers, I am forcing myself to learn my lines and trying to think of other things.
Why don’t I like this show? Well, first of all, I don’t like any of the people in it. Oh, Thelma’s all right, but we aren’t on together much, and it’s more that I don’t have any objection to her than any sort of fondness or even interest. The main character, Mother Watts, is a passive-aggressive, selfish, impossible woman. Yes, she has positive elements to her character, and yes, she is put in an untenable situation through no real fault of her own, but Lord, Lord, what an awful person to spend time with. As for Jessie Mae—she has, at least, some spark of vitality, although she puts that to use in making everybody around her miserable in petty ways. Again, she’s not entirely evil, and of course her situation is as awful as everyone else’s, but she is the sort of person you avoid in life as much as you can.
And my own character? Well, he’s a despairing, broken man. He has failed at everything, probably through little fault of his own. His home life is witness to an unending cascade of petty squabbling; his work life is as junior to younger men in a tedious job without real hope of advancement. He was advancing (perhaps, it isn’t clear) before some illness forced him to spend two years in bed as an invalid. Now, starting over at forty, he’s just killing time and paying the rent.
Digression: The first version of the play was written in 1953 and is set in the present, more or less. Now, it’s a period piece. But thinking about Ludie as being 40 in 1953 (or so), and having spent two years in bed recently, I was trying to figure out what was wrong with him. It had to be something that required a long bed rest, and it had to be something from which he could recover enough to go back to work, although leaving him weak enough that six months after starting work his wife is still worried about a relapse. I am thinking heart; they did at the time put people in bed rest for heart problems (which of course was wrong, wrong, wrong), and his mother has some sort of heart problem as well. It could have been lung-related (pneumonia and complications), or a soft-tissue problem like fibromyalgia (although of course that wouldn’t have been diagnosed in 1953). I don’t think I’ll be using the information, but it makes me curious. Also, a heart problem could have kept him out of the war—they don’t mention the war at all, but there’s certainly no indication that he served, and he would have been old-but-not-too-old when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He could have been exempted as sole-support, although of course lots of such people did volunteer. Again, not really useful, but once you start thinking about these people as people, certain questions come up. End Digression.
Anyway, I don’t like Ludie. I have pity for him, surely, but I don’t like him. And it’s hard for me to interpret the play as having any kind of redemption for any of them. I mean, yes, it’s the way people are—people talk about Horton Foote as rejecting the sentimental epiphanies in favor of the complexity of real life. And I see that. I understand, at least distantly, that lots of people like to recognize his characters as being like themselves and people they know; they prefer that to the outsized characters of Shakespeare or Kushner. I don’t quite get, myself, why they like that, where the pleasure comes in, but there it is: people are different one to another, and that is what makes the world interesting and fun. Presumably people are coming to this show to see a Ludie (and the rest) that are real, and I will work to provide that. But I don’t like lots of real people, and I don’t like Ludie.
And there aren’t any real people I don’t like that I will be spending much time with this Fall, I hope. But I will be spending a lot of time with Ludie, and with Jessie Mae and with Mother Watts, and although there are still lots of enjoyable things about putting on the show, the company is a distinct drawback.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.