STAGE REVIEW : ‘PAINTING’ A BLURRED PORTRAIT

Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches,” in which a young artist visits her aging parents in Boston, is an incomplete, almost oblique work, like a courtroom illustration in which certain features are detailed while others are left to trail off in penciled lines. Yet the play keeps cropping up in production. Both the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts and San Diego’s Old Globe did it last summer, and now it’s running on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage.

The first half of this production could hardly have been more directorially misconceived. Lee Shallat has imposed a Kaufman & Hart pace on the elderly Fanny and Gardner Church as they prepare to move permanently to their summer cottage. Their big Boston house, reft of the furnishings of more vigorously lived-in years, echoes with hollowness.

Gardner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet drifting in and out of the fogs of senility, and Fanny is a woman of no small intelligence, patience and wit. It’s been a marriage, and Fanny has a keener view of the best of their lives as having passed, as well as bearing heart-rending witness to Gardner’s pathetic slide back into childishness.

Patricia Fraser plays Fanny, and at first her style is manic and overblown, even silly, as though she’s working hard for conventional comic effect. Ford Rainey plays up the old fuddy-duddy aspect of Gardner without showing us those moments of penetrating lucidity and poetic richness for which Gardner has been celebrated, and which occasionally come back to him. It’s a one-note performance.

Joan McMurtrey as the daughter Mags has no point of view to bring to a character who isn’t clearly conceived in the first place. Her Act I curtain line, “I have abilities. Very . . . strong . . . abilities,” is a cry for recognition. And if the folks ignore her, you’re tempted to say too, “Yes, dear, now run along.” Truth to tell, Mags is a bit of a nonentity.

Act II settled in opening night once Fraser got hold of herself and gave us a woman of poignant sensibility (the other performances remained unchanged). It’s startling to hear, as we heard earlier, “I’d put a bullet in my head in a minute, but who’d take care of him?” Moments like this give “Painting Churches” its pointedness, not only because of Fanny’s hard knowledge of ruin and decay, but because we’re living in a society in which more and more people are living to old age, a condition that has not been popularly revered in America.

“Painting Churches” isn’t a problem play the way a TV “Movie of the Week” tends to make a protagonist the embodiment of a social problem and nothing else, but it is a play whose popularity is based on its timing instead of its art. How do we care for the elderly, our old folks, in a way that’s not indifferent or demeaning to them? It’s an emerging and chastening issue for our throwaway, fast-food culture.

There’s one moment in “Painting Churches” that is art. In the final scene, Mags watches Fanny and Gardner dancing together. She stands at their periphery, like a curious and somewhat baffled young girl. She’s come to memorialize them, to help them, and to show them how much she cares for them, even to prove somehow that she’s become equal to their spirit and accomplishment. Mags’ disappointment shows. We are always a child in the house of our parents, no matter how long we live. And there’s a limit to what we can ask of them by way of love. They married each other, not us. ‘PAINTING CHURCHES’

A play by Tina Howe, with Patricia Fraser, Ford Rainey, Joan McMurtrey. Director Lee Shallat. Setting Mark Donnelly. Costumes Shigeru Yaji. Lighting Peter Maradudin. Performances Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8:30 p.m., Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees, 3 p.m., at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (714) 957-4033. Ends Dec. 1.