Playwright Focuses on a Bittersweet Past : In ‘Lily Dale,’ Horton Foote’s Magic Lantern Brings to Life a Texas Hometown and Family

His voice came on the line with a gentle Southern drawl, the soft-spoken words flowing warmly in gracious cadences not unlike the modulations of his plays. What Robert Duvall, the actor and his close friend, once remarked of his writing--”rural Chekov, simple but deep”--might apply to his conversation.

“Though I dwell on the past a lot, I’m not very nostalgic about it,” Horton Foote, a two-time Academy Award-winning writer, was saying. “The past was not all virtuous. There were many conflicts. Many strains. People say life was so simple way back when. It really wasn’t. They didn’t have The Bomb, but they had other things. I think all life is a matter of complications.”

Indeed, the complications of the past have never been more devoutly chronicled on the American stage than in Foote’s nine-play cycle “The Orphans’ Home,” which is based on the lives of his parents and their families. It is set from 1902 to 1929, in or near the small Texas town about 50 miles from Houston where Foote grew up.

“Lily Dale,” the third play in the cycle, is being produced by the Grove Theatre Company. It opened over the weekend at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove. It unfolds in 1910 when Horace Robedaux, a 20-year-old store clerk who was semi-orphaned at 12 by the death of his alcoholic father, takes the train to Houston to see his younger sister, Lily, and his remarried mother, Corella, after a long separation. The visit turns out to be not quite what he expected.

“In a sense, I write for myself,” said Foote, who began setting down his bittersweet family saga in 1974. “I guess I’m trying to straighten out a few things. That’s why I write--for inner clarification. Of course, I’m delighted when it’s shared and others respond.”

All the plays gain a resonance from each other in their evocation of social change and lost innocence through the recurrence of certain figures from work to work. Horace, who is loosely modeled on the playwright’s father, is the protagonist of the cycle. But each play “was designed to be done on its own,” Foote said.

Foote was speaking from his childhood home in Wharton, Tex. The 72-year-old playwright bought the house back a few years ago and said he makes regular pilgrimages there to stimulate both his memory and his imagination.

“Whenever I come back here,” he said of the wood-frame bungalow, “I am thrust even further back than childhood because I grew up with great-aunts who were oral historians. The people they told me about were almost as real as the people I knew. So I am reminded of things that took place before I came along.”

Foote, who lives in New York’s Greenwich Village, recalled that he first left Texas more than half a century ago to make his career as an actor. He started as an apprentice at the Pasadena Playhouse during the mid-’30s and then went East to become a Broadway star. But that never happened. Instead he became an off-Broadway writer, turning out plays such as “Wharton Dance” and “Texas Town” for the American Actors Theatre.

Then he caught a rising medium called television. Starting with rewrites for the “Gabby Hayes Show” in 1950, he eventually scripted original dramas and adaptations (of Faulkner stories, for instance) for prime-time network programs: the “Philco-Goodyear Playhouse,” “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90,” “The DuPont Show of the Month.”

Among a score or so of his TV plays, two of the most notable were “The Trip to Bountiful” with Lillian Gish (who took it to Broadway in 1953; it was remade as a 1985 movie with Geraldine Page in an Academy Award-winning performance) and “Roots in a Parched Ground” (reworked as the first play of “The Orphans’ Home” cycle).

By the mid-’50s, Hollywood beckoned. And in 1962 Foote won an Oscar for his adaptation of Lee Harper’s Pulitzer Prize novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about a Gothic Alabama town caught up in a racist rape trial.

“It was a very creative experience for me,” Foote reflected. The movie starred Gregory Peck as a forbearing hometown defense lawyer and introduced Robert Duvall, a newcomer to the screen, in the featured role of a reclusive, brain-damaged hero. Foote and his wife had seen Duvall at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York--”We were knocked out by his work”--and got him the role.

It was Duvall, not coincidentally, who later starred in “Tender Mercies,” which in 1983 earned Foote a second Oscar for screenwriting. “That movie was unique,” Foote said, “the only thing I ever wrote directly for the screen. Everything else had been adaptations.”

“Tender Mercies,” about a country singer at rock bottom who remakes his life, has elicited the kind of praise you hear in Nobel Prize speeches. Novelist and literary critic Reynolds Price went so far as to compare Foote with St. Augustine for his “face-to-face contemplation of human degradation and regeneration.”

During the late-’60s, though, dismal, star-studded, big-budget movie projects such as “The Chase” and “Hurry Sundown” had contributed to Foote’s decision to drop out and move to New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Lillian, raised two daughters and two sons.

“I never really complained about the Hollywood system because I knew what it was,” he recounted. “Some people can be very creative within it. I like to do my own work and there was a time in Hollywood when they resisted that. The system just wasn’t for me and still isn’t.”

Nearly a decade later, after the death of his mother in 1974, Foote began making notes for his play cycle. Within a couple of years he had the first drafts of eight plays: “Roots in a Parched Ground” (redone from his TV script), “Convicts,” “Lily Dale,” “Courtship,” “Valentine’s Day,” “1918,” “The Death of Papa” and “Cousins.”

A ninth, “The Widow Claire,” was conceived later but fits chronologically into the cycle immediately following “Lily Dale.” The title for the saga comes from a line by the poet Marianne Moore: “The world’s an orphans’ home.” Asked the sequence in which he actually wrote the plays, Foote said he began with “1918” but could not recall the rest of the order.

“I’m no model for a writer because I’m an obsessive,” he said. “Once I get going it’s hard for someone to stop me. My family has had this problem for years. I don’t sit down at 9 in the morning, eat lunch at 12 and go out to an art gallery at 3. I may wake up at 2 in the morning to write. It controls me. I don’t control it.

“And I write longhand much to the despair of my wife who must decipher it. I write so rapidly that my longhand has become shorthand. I can’t even decipher it myself.”

Though Foote gets his ideas pell-mell, the finished results are “lovely take-your-time scripts,” said Daniel Bryan Cartmell, who is directing “Lily Dale” at the Gem. The play, which premiered on Broadway in 1986 with Molly Ringwald in the title role, allows the actors to explore “quiet moments that don’t come along often on the stage,” Cartmell said.

Even so, Foote regards “Lily Dale” as one of the more volatile plays in the cycle. And Cartmell agrees. For one thing, Lily’s hostile stepfather “is not particularly fond of Horace,” Cartmell noted. For another, Lily “has the hysterical nature of a spoiled brat.”

At first, “we wrestled with the problem of her self-absorption,” the 38-year-old director said. In order to make her more sympathetic, Lily was portrayed during early rehearsals as “frothy and light.” But that seemed to turn the play into “a drawing-room soap opera.”

Finally, Cartmell said, “we spent a week exploring Lily’s darker qualities--her dreams of death, her fears of sex and childbirth. If you buy into that, it lends her credibility. You see a portrait of many women at the turn of the century. And if you believe Lily’s fears, you don’t find her so awful.”

In the meantime, the huge problem of alcoholism that runs through the cycle with devastating consequences is established firmly in “Lily Dale” as a crucial dividing line for Horace--separating the past from the future.

Abstemious himself, Horace has experienced “tragedy all around him because of alcohol,” Cartmell said. “His father drank himself to death. And just before ‘Lily Dale,’ his aunts and uncles have had a couple of catastrophes. He wants to escape all that.”

Nobody yet has mounted a play festival of the cycle, something Foote would love to see happen. But he and his family have been turning the plays into movies and television productions so rapidly that somebody is bound to launch a film festival.

The play “1918” reached the screen in 1985; “(On) Valentine’s Day” followed in 1986. Foote’s daughter, Hallie, starred as his mother--the fictional Elizabeth Robedaux--in both films. Matthew Broderick also played a featured role--Brother Vaughn--in both.

American Playhouse did a five-part series on public television in 1987 called “The Story of a Marriage” based on “1918,” “Courtship” and “Valentine’s Day.” And “Courtship,” again starring Hallie Foote as Elizabeth, will be released to theaters in the spring.

“Roots in a Parched Ground” is going into pre-production in March, Foote said, and will be shot on location in Louisiana this spring. “Convicts,” starring Duvall, was to have begun production this month on a sugar plantation near New Orleans, but filming was delayed until fall, Foote said.

Now he is prepping “Lily Dale” for the screen. Mary Stuart Masterson already has agreed to play the title role, he said. That leaves three more plays, two of which are about to be published.

Not bad for someone whose obsessive devotion to recapturing the past has earned him criticism in some quarters as the equivalent of a writing fossil.

“I can understand exactly what they mean,” Foote declared. “I’m sure many young people feel that way about me. But I can’t wait to get up in the morning and get at it again.”

Some fossil.

The Grove Theatre Company’s production of “Lily Dale” by Horton Foote continues through Feb. 18 at the Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Admission: $13 to $17. Information: (714) 636-7213.