STAGE REVIEW : ‘FOXFIRE’: AN EXPERIENCE TO WARM ONE’S SOUL BY

There’s no use in pretending that “Foxfire” is much of a play, any more than it’s no use in pretending that Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy won’t at some point win you over in it. They demonstrate what successful theater is beyond coldly transferable literature--something that draws you into other people’s experience, where you find yourself wanting to break out of their dream and into their lives.

“Foxfire,” which is having its Los Angeles premiere at the CTG/Ahmanson, is a play with music by Cronyn and Susan Cooper based on materials from the Foxfire books edited by Eliot Wiggington and his students. The setting is Southern Appalachia, specifically the farmhouse, shed and clearing of Hector and Annie Nations (Cronyn and Tandy), which commands an almost mystical view of the Appalachian hills.

Hector has died, though he’s very much a cantankerous presence, like Hugh Leonard’s “Da,” and Annie is keeping the place going while alert to the signs of having to move on. That eager real estate agent Prince Carpenter is offering a truly estimable price for permission to put up a mountaintop development on their site, and her son Dillard, a professional musician, needs her to look after the kids now that his wife has left him.

That’s virtually the entire plot. “Foxfire’s” first act is dilatory, and as a whole the play falls into the trap of sentimentalizing an American past. “Foxfire” is shot through with the hymn-like tone of the ennobled common man. It has no nose for evil. The Appalachian way of life is traditionally one of the toughest ways to live in America. Here you see almost nothing of the mean weather, the rock-hard poverty, the lives spent early in disease and in trying to scrape survival out of unyielding elements. Aside from a few inferences, you don’t get the chill that never leaves the marrow.

Cronyn’s and Tandy’s performances through that sentimentally vague first act are lean and hard enough to carry us through, and Keith Carradine as Dillard, singing his father’s song to commercial country accompaniment, shows us the amiable, corrupt ease with which an older generation has been banalized by its successor. Carradine gives a big, masculine, engaging performance, incidentally; it would have been brilliant had he been able to show somewhere what he had lost by shifting into the modern world of country Muzak.

In Act II, the details by which stories are memorably told begin piling up. Hector and Annie share a single pair of eyeglasses. When Annie stands up to Hector’s marriage proposal--a woman is as hard as a man here--Hector vows that “I’ll take care of you” and Cronyn tosses his hat and snatches it out of the air, as though he were catching his own free-falling fate. When Cronyn’s Hector, in an absurdly patriarchal 19th-Century gesture, commands Dillard into the house for a disciplinary hiding, Tandy gives him a killer look and says, “You just broke it.” When Hector dies and Annie lays him out on a table to prepare him for burial, she loses one of the quarters she’ll place over his eyes and is grief-stricken. And when Tandy touches Cronyn’s forehead, it’s with the unmistakable, almost naked intimacy with which a wife touches her husband, even when he’s dead.

Donna Bullock is a bit strident as the young schoolteacher, Holly, who wants to make an anthropological record of their lives, but Tom Stechschulte is excellent as the gregariously conniving real estate agent Prince--you can believe that he eagerly spends his spare time at salesmen’s Saturday morning pep sessions--and Kenny Kosek, Roger Mason and Tony Trischka are first-rate backup musicians for Carradine (Jack Davidson is good in a negligible role as a doctor).

The experience of “Foxfire” is really the experience of seeing two people who have well-earned their place as America’s first acting couple. It’s hard to believe she’s 76 and he’s 74. They seem to be any age they want to be. Their performances are both joyous and beautifully contained, and they never presume to do anything more than enrich the fabric of their play, however thin it may be. You’ll never forget having seen them here.

David Mitchell’s moody Appalachian set makes you feel as though you could take a long solitary walk in secret valleys should events at the Nations’ place become too heated or tedious. Robert Blackman did the fine costumes and Ken Billington the lights. David Trainer directs.

Performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., with Thursday, Saturday and Sunday matinees, 2 p.m., at 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 410-1062, through Jan. 11.

‘FOXFIRE’ A play with songs by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn, with Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, Keith Carradine, Donna Bullock, Jack Davidson and Tom Stechschulte. Music composed and directed by Jon Brielle. Set design, David Mitchell. Costumes, Robert Blackman, Lighting, Ken Billington. Directed byt David Trainer. Through Jan. 11 at the CTG/Ahmanson Theatre.