‘CHURCHES’ PAINTS BLEAK EMOTIONAL TRIP HOME

Rather like a precarious house of cards, Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches” is an imperfectly mortared play that remains standing, not through the skill of its dramaturgy, but through the honesty of its emotions.

Howe’s examination of the intersecting relationships of a daughter to her parents and those parents to each other is impeccable. The methods she employs to get there are another matter.

At the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, where “Churches” opened Friday, the demands of the in-the-round staging and the small size of the space put a further crimp in what may be one of the decade’s most overburdened plays: up to its neck in props, over its head in exposition. It takes special actors to dispose of both gracefully and it gets them at the Globe.

For her part, Howe isn’t much help. The Churches--Fanny and Gardner--are moving permanently to their country cottage and we find them in the midst of packing up the old Boston home. Well, at least, Fanny’s packing. Her husband, Gardner, an “abstracted” literary type (to quote Howe) is burrowing in his offstage studio, putting together the critical tome of the century. Most of Act I consists of Fanny (Julianna McCarthy) shouting offstage to Gardner (G Wood) or talking to herself. It is not the easiest way to pass on information.

The Churches are expecting the arrival of their only daughter, Mags (Margaret Gibson), a young portraitist who is beginning to make a name for herself in the New York art world. She may have impressed the New York critics, but impressing her parents is not so easy.

For Mags, the trip home is a pilgrimage--a way to make peace with parents who love her but have not always been kind or even been there for her, though clearly they don’t know it. One of the things she hopes to do is to paint them. It will be a way of finding a path to forgiveness, of reaching across the mine field of buried emotions to some sort of annealment.

Howe excels at this, but blending the valuable emotional interfacing with the blatantly awkward mechanics of the play is left to the actors and director--and it becomes a major problem only partially solved here.

Take Mags’ arrival. For several seconds, she stands around recounting the difficulties she had getting there before, in fact, psychologically acknowledging that she has arrived. They are endless seconds for any actress to get through, because they are emotionally false.

And that is not Mags’ only hurdle. She remains an enigmatic creature who does a lot of standing around, reacting, while her parents (mostly her mother) talk. It is an aspect of this role that Gibson handles with all the dignity she can muster, but even that is not always enough. When she gets to reverse the situation--that is, do the talking while they listen, as in the central scene of the play in which she exposes all her pain--she’s excellent.

Howe has taken considerably more loving care to flesh out the senior Churches than she has her alter ego, Mags. McCarthy and Wood are meticulous in the way they run roughshod over each other’s feelings (and jointly over Mags’), redeeming everything with moments of such exquisite connection that, by play’s end, we’re awed, moved, infuriated and grateful for the compassion that overtakes the frenzy.

In the most conflicted of the roles, McCarthy balances the playful and domineering aspects of the overwhelming Fanny in a manner that allows us to embrace rather than reject her. But it is Wood’s lyrical divagations and small physical accidents as the tender poet Gardner that quite steal away our hearts.

Robert Berlinger’s direction finds only some solutions to the configuration of the space and its area limitations. There’s a lot of running up and down aisles and crowding on the actual stage that scenic designer Alan K. Okazaki is not really able to relieve--and John B. Forbes’ lighting seemed erratic at the Saturday performance. Careful costuming by Sally Cleveland, however, enhances the characters in the best sense: not just as external covering, but by augmenting our sense of their internal landscapes.

Performances in Balboa Park run in repertory with “Richard III” (opening Friday) and “London Assurance” (619-239-2255).