Playwright Davis, Actress Baxter Dissect a Beleaguered Family’s Backbone in Drama

“Probably one of the worst things that can be said about someone is that they’re spineless,” says director-playwright Bill C. Davis with a shudder, as he sits in the waning crimson daylight pouring in on the Cast Theatre’s patio.

But the damning word preoccupies the acclaimed author of “Mass Appeal” during rehearsals of the world premiere of “Spine,” which opened Tuesday at the Cast in Hollywood.

Davis is also not sure how much to reveal of the play, starring Meredith Baxter.

Baxter, who is in Davis’ intense family drama after seven television seasons as architect mom Elyse Keaton on “Family Ties,” says: “We talk about the play in these terms: A young boy is sick, and this is his last night.”

She understands Davis’ skittishness about labeling “Spine” as some disease-of-the-week potboiler: It’s a genre ghetto she’s tried to avoid in her several TV movies, including the 1989 “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” adapted by her ex-husband, David Birney, from Mark Twain tales (and subsequently staged during her artist residency at Dartmouth College).

In fact, “Spine” is focused less on Christy, the youngest child in a family of five, than on the family’s ability to hold on through its crisis. If the family is a ship buffeted by emotional storms, Baxter’s June is the captain. Her husband, Mike, played by Richard Gilliland, is an airline pilot; he can handle a 747, but not this.

“He is petrified,” notes Baxter, “though I think for the rest of the family--(Mackenzie Astin as Mike Jr. and Miriam Parish as Claire)--it’s less fear than denial. June and Mike Sr. really have a good, respecting marriage. She doesn’t cry. Her attitude is ‘let’s take care of what needs to be done.’ Her concern is with the living. She wants everyone to be able to live with themselves afterwards.

“Bill has remarked to me, ‘Women are amazing. They do everything .’ On the other hand, a feminist friend of mine observed that if the roles were reversed, and June was the one incapable of doing anything, we would be furious at her. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s true. We expect women to keep the family together.”

If anyone knows, it’s Baxter. “I have to get home to two twins, who are about to turn 7. This has been marvelous, but exhausting.”

She marvels at the contrast between working at the austere but intimate Cast and the cushy, less-taxing conditions at Paramount, only a block away, where “Family Ties” was shot: “At the end of a day with this play, my mind feels like Jell-O with shredded paper inside. TV is nothing like this.”

Davis has no children, but painfully knows what it is to be a caretaker. “My younger sister, Lois, came down with cancer at 30. This happened after I had been shopping around for a horse and bought one from a woman whose boy was sick at home. It was weird watching how sickness in another family suddenly became less abstract when it hit your own.”

After finishing a first draft in 1985, Davis drove Lois “down to Tijuana for cancer treatments you can’t get in this country, and then I was supposed to come back to the Cast for a reading of ‘Spine.’ I wasn’t sure if I could handle that, you know.”

Somehow, he did, and after “Mass Appeal,” “Wrestlers” (in which Davis performed at the Cast opposite Mark Harmon) and “Dancing in the End Zone,” Davis was finding about as fine a balance between critical acceptance and commercial success as any American dramatist in the ‘80s. Lois’ death in 1986 cast Davis in a father role, as he helped care for her son during the next year.

“I’ve seen families up close, very close,” he says. “And I’ve realized--this is something that’s really basic to the play--that families have a dynamic in which tensions have to erupt to the surface first, before they’re redeemed.”

Having helped shepherd “Spine” through six years, six drafts and a couple of aborted productions, Cast artistic director Diana Gibson looks at Davis’ play as, in a sense, a special child: “In my years at the Cast, I’ve read at least a thousand new American plays. This is the only one written in this generation that genuinely makes me cry, that actually helps people get through difficulties. Very, very few new plays do that.” Referring to the Cast’s late artistic director, Ted Schmitt, she adds, “It appealed immensely to Ted, who had a very humanitarian instinct.”

The Cast is the young playwright’s Mecca--at least in this part of the world--and usually doesn’t attract a nationally known writer such as Davis, let alone a star such as Baxter. But after “Wrestlers” played at the Cast, Davis felt drawn to Los Angeles (and in fact may move here from his Connecticut home). And a mutual friend of Baxter and Gibson, Lorimar executive Nina Taffler, ensured that Baxter saw Davis’ script.

“Bill has a tremendous ear for inter-family dialogue,” Baxter. says. Although playwright-directors are notorious for being sticklers about their own vision, he “has a gentle approach as a director; he leaves room for the actor to find the way,” she says.

Davis--who has a new play, “Expatriate,” and two new musicals, “Off Key” and “Body Snatchers” (based on the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), in various stages of development, says “Spine” projects optimism for its own sake. Underlying it, he feels, is “what Thoreau wrote about life insisting on itself.”

“Human beings are basically good at heart--I really believe that. Yet many think that their own humanness, whether it’s frailties, faults, vulnerabilities, is a limitation. But it’s the body itself, from the eyes to the heart to the spine, that has great poetic meanings and connections.”