People's Light & Theatre Presents THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL, Beginning 3/13

People's Light & Theatre presents Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, running March 13-April 7, 2013 on the Steinbright Stage. AbiGail Adams directs. People's Light & Theatre is located at 39 Conestoga Road, Malvern, PA 19355. For tickets call 610.644.3500 or visit PeoplesLight.org.

The air by the river, the song of the red bird, and the feel of the soil in her fingers, Carrie Watts' fondest wish is to revisit Bountiful, the small town of her youth. Set in 1947, The Trip to Bountiful, is a beautiful and heartbreaking story from one of our country's greatest writers, Horton Foote.

Foote's extensive body of work includes teleplays, memoirs, and over 60 stage plays and screenplays (To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies.) The durability and resilience of Foote's work is especially apparent in the endurance of Carrie Watts' story. The Trip to Bountiful began as a television play in 1953. That same year Foote adapted it for Broadway. In 1985, he adapted the story again, into a screenplay for the film starring Geraldine Page, who won an Academy Award for her performance as Carrie Watts. In 2005, an off-Broadway revival played successfully at the Signature Theatre.

Director AbiGail Adams teams up once again with actor Carla Belver to bring this story of struggle, fortitude, memory, and reconciliation to the stage. Belver played Clara in the People's Light production of The Traveling Lady in 1989 and Stella in the 2011 production of Dividing the Estate. In preparation for their work on The Traveling Lady, Adams and Belver visited Foote and his wife Lillian in the Summer of 1989. They toured Foote's hometown of Wharton, and Foote did what he does best - he told stories about various landmarks, some abandoned or "eerily empty," and about the people whose names were etched on the cemetery's gravestones.

Many of Foote's plays include characters who hold on to memories of a lost past while they confront relentless change. In a 2006 interview, three years before his death, Foote reflected: "It used to just kill me when certain things that were beautiful died or were torn down. I never wanted anything to change. But if you don't make peace with the changes in life, it will break your heart."

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