Are you a fan of classic American theatre? Then acquaint yourself with the Clare Rose Playhouse on the scenic Lakeside campus of St. Joseph’s University in Patchogue. Their latest production, “The Trip to Bountiful,” opens on February 21 and runs through March 9, 2025. The talented cast includes Joel Cardoza, Tom Ciorciari, Tamralynn Dorsa, Bobby James Evers, Renne McClean, Lisa Meckes, and Lon Shomer.
“The Trip to Bountiful” is an American treasure written by the prolific American playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote. In 1963, Foote won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He garnered a second Oscar in 1984 for his original screenplay, “Tender Mercies.” In 1995, his full-length play “The Young Man from Atlanta” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
In 1953, Foote wrote “The Trip to Bountiful” as a live broadcast teleplay for the “Philco Television Playhouse,” a well-loved dramatic television show featuring 60-minute plays. During the Golden Age of Television, this popular dramatic series produced plays by well-known playwrights and writers, such as George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. This NBC show also launched the television careers of many writers, including Horton Foote, Gore Vidal, Tad Mosel, William Templeton, and Paddy Chayefsky. Foote’s first teleplay proved so successful that eight months after its television premiere, “The Trip to Bountiful” opened on Broadway.
Foote believed in writing what you know, and what he knew best was the life of ordinary Texans living in small towns like the one he grew up in. In a 1986 interview with The New York Times Magazine, Foote discussed the themes that continually resurfaced in his work, “I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity.”
“The Trip to Bountiful” is an American road drama filled with Foote’s universal and timeless themes concerning family discourse, nostalgic longing for days long gone, loss, death, regret, remorse, and the resilience of the human spirit. One line of dialogue from this mid-20th-century masterpiece could be a mantra for our divisive times: “We have to live together, and we’re going to live together in peace.”
Simple in plot structure but complex as a study of the human psyche, this play, infused with Foote’s most endearing sentiments, focuses on the feisty, strong-willed, long-suffering widow, Carrie Watts, hellbent on returning to her birthplace in “Bountiful,” Texas. Even though Bountiful turns out to be a ghost town, and her childhood home, a mere skeleton of itself unlikely “to last out the next Gulf storm,” Watts felt eternally grateful for one last chance to go home.
This staple of American theatre has spawned many revivals, including an Off-Broadway production in 2005 by the Signature Theatre Company at the Peter Norton Space. The critically acclaimed 2013 Broadway production featured an all-Black cast starring Cicely Tyson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Condola Rashād, and Vanessa Williams.
In 1985, Foote wrote the screenplay for the film version of “The Trip to Bountiful” and received an Academy Award nomination for his efforts. Geraldine Page won the Oscar for Best Actress for her riveting portrayal of the headstrong lead. The year 1985 proved bountiful for St. Joe’s as well. Thanks to the generosity of the late Clare Rose, the patriarch of a privately-owned Patchogue beverage distributor, a cottage on the campus was converted into a beautiful theatrical venue named in honor of its benefactor.
The Clare Rose Playhouse is a teaching facility for the university’s theater courses and a training ground for young actors. Open year-round, the stage hosts productions of children’s theatre, storytelling, and theatre for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The playhouse also serves as an intimate forum for local playwrights and poets and hosts community theater productions, including musicals, dance troupes, dramas, comedies, cabaret acts, concerts, and comedians.
If you’re craving a dose of nostalgia and long for simpler times, head to the iconic Clare Rose Playhouse at St. Joseph’s University, 155 W. Roe Blvd, Patchogue, NY, 11772. You can reserve tickets by phone at 631-654-0199 or purchase them at the door. The playhouse only accepts cash or check payments.
Keeping up with the tradition of bringing masterworks to St. Joseph’s University, David Auburn’s “Proof” opens at the Clare Rose Playhouse on April 25 and runs through May 11, 2025. In 2001, this family-based drama achieved a theatrical trifecta: the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony Award for Best Play, and a Drama Desk Award for Best New Play.
Editor’s Note: Our print edition of this article included a graphic with inaccurate information about the play’s opening date. Our apologies for any confusion.
