STAGE REVIEW : Trying to Patch It All Up With Family of ‘Lily Dale’

Horace Robedaux is sitting in a train compartment en route to Houston from his home in Harrison, Tex. In a matter of minutes--what in the trade is called “compressed stage time”--he explains his family history to an inquisitive Baptist woman.

If it feels to viewers of Horton Foote’s play, “Lily Dale,” at the Grove Theatre Company in Garden Grove, that they’re coming in on the middle of the story, they are. “Lily Dale” is actually number three in a nine-play cycle by Foote titled “The Orphans’ Home.” Although Foote’s name is typically associated with his Oscar-winning screenplays, “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Tender Mercies,” the “Orphans’ ” cycle is the centerpiece of his work.

It focuses largely on Harrison and the Robedaux family, rent by an alcoholic father, and son Horace (Clay Crosby) trying to patch it back together. Before the present play came “Roots In a Parched Ground,” about the family in collapse, followed by “Convicts,” in which Horace tries to get a decent tombstone for his father’s grave.

Horace is sensitive to the collective family memory, as if he were taking it all on his shoulders, and so he’s haunted by the past. He presumes he’s alone with his ghosts, until the family reunion.

Little does he realize that he’s himself a kind of living ghost for Lily Dale, his sister (Viiu Spangler). Her life with mother, who, when she remarried, could afford to support only the girl (leaving older Horace to fend for himself), is an elaborate escape from a sullen family history. All the books, so to speak, have been burned, and Lily Dale sees herself--with mother’s accommodation--as the center of the universe.

A new alternative to the phrase “spoiled child” must be invented for Lily Dale in action, such as when she’s showing off her new Chopin piano interpretation for mother. Mother is simply looking out the curtains to make sure Horace gets the right streetcar back to the station. Lily Dale won’t play “unless everyone is listening.” It’s either Horace or her.

During performance, this strikes one as interesting character behavior--how far can Lily Dale wrap everyone, including her gruff stepfather Pete, around her finger. But on the page, it’s akin to an artist’s declaration of rights, and ego. It’s as if Foote, who surely takes enormous pleasure in being listened to, is both announcing and scolding himself.

These kinds of buried meanings, scattered throughout the play, don’t really hit you on a first visit. Foote’s people often talk as flat as a Texas plain. Emotions tend to get repressed by these people and the denial of them is one of the key dramas in “Lily Dale.” Foote’s most effective way of showing this is when they get sidetracked in conversation. A great way of covering up a multitude of fears.

Horace, in his least effective character trait, seldom gets side-tracked. He is in Houston on a mission, and nothing is going to deter him, even when he is sick with a “fever” (actually, nervous exhaustion). For a large portion of the play, he’s too weak to get out of bed, yet finds reserves of strength to push Lily Dale into recalling the childhood she wants no part of.

One part of him tends to cancel another part out, and it’s hard to believe that Foote intends this. It’s even harder to accept Foote’s dogged insistence on giving Pete no cause for his total disgust at Horace (it doesn’t help that actor Rick Franklin plays it so heavily at the start that he can’t add weight later). “He’s just that way”-- mother’s excuse--won’t cut it. This is not the kind of play that can suffer groundless obnoxiousness.

Most of the time at the Grove, director Daniel Bryan Cartmell provides the ground for the actors to stand on. Among them, only Dietrich Bader as Lily Dale’s fiance brings any interesting complications to the role. Bader adds to the working stiff persona some smarts and an ability to smell out the power relationships.

Crosby struggles to tap into the pain dogging Horace. As long as Horace is playing nice, or is genuinely naive on some point, Crosby seems ideal. Beneath the surface, there’s some digging to do.

That’s true for the rest of the cast, too, but there are glimpses of something ready to break through with Spangler’s Lily Dale. She’s very good at playing the little girl, and is close to suggesting the woman to come.

Since “Lily Dale” is an undoubtedly richer experience in the context of the plays that surround it, it would be good to see the rest of the cycle. This is traditional work with some creakiness, but it’s a reminder that August Wilson isn’t the only American playwright with a saga.

At 12852 Main St., Garden Grove, on Wednesdays through Saturdays, also Feb. 17-18, 8 p.m.; Sunday and Feb. 5, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 12, 3 p.m. Ends Feb. 18. Tickets: $13-$17; (714) 636-7213.