Facing the Ghost of Guilt : LEE GRANT-DIRECTED ‘REUNION’ GRAPPLES WITH A MOTHER’S DARK JOURNEY FROM DESPAIR

Marlo Thomas, who lives with husband Phil Donahue in a sprawling Connecticut mansion, is the last person you’d expect to see hauling herself up a ladder in an old barn choking with haydust.

But Thomas is a hard-working actress who expects no privileges (well, maybe a few: a private cook attends her in her trailer). She has undertaken the difficult role of Jessie Yates, a woman who lives and works on a farm in New England with her three children and husband--a perfect world, until the sudden death of her 5-year-old son.

“It’s a story about something you can’t solve,” Thomas says. “I wanted to know how a woman like this could go on.”

Thomas’ interest in “Reunion,” which airs Sunday night on CBS, is intense. She is also the producer, and she made sure it would be directed by her friend Lee Grant, who brought her acclaim (and an Emmy) with another TV movie, “Nobody’s Child.”

“Reunion” focuses on the one night in 1,000 when a mother ignored the crying on the nursery intercom, and her son strangled to death. Soon she begins to see and hear his ghost, and finds herself contemplating suicide in order to “rejoin” him.

For Thomas, however, the film--based on Linda Gray Sexton’s novel “Points of Light”--does more than simply press the panic button of every mother in America. It asks serious questions about the morbidity that lurks within the mother-child bond. It shows how Jessie, the most sensible of women, comes to believe that killing herself and the twin sister of the son she lost is the only way to reunite the three.

Thomas, who was so gripped by the book that Donahue couldn’t get her to put it down at suppertime, says that Jessie’s dilemma--”this unaccountable blameless thing” that leaves her contemplating tragic options--is what raises “Reunion” above the level of a happy-ending TV movie.

“TV is way ahead of motion pictures as far as women are concerned,” she says. “There are those who say that TV is a woman’s medium. It’s doing the thing those Olivia de Havilland B flicks did in the ‘40s. TV is where the stories are!”

Lee Grant agrees. The sex symbol of “Peyton Place” and winner of an Oscar (for “Shampoo”), abandoned film for TV when she became a director because she found that women still don’t have the clout to make feature films.

“Oh, there’s maybe two who can. The problem is the studios want action. That’s why you have four good actresses doing something like”--there is just the hint of her nose wrinkling--”Bad Girls.”

Given the several years of headbanging it would have taken to get “Reunion” into feature production, Grant and Thomas chose the TV route. Which is fine, says Grant with a laugh, “if you don’t mind doing it in half the time with a quarter of the money!”

Grant is sitting outside a rambling ocher-red barn in Hudson, a genteel rural suburb of Montreal whose candy-cute downtown stands in for the Midwestern small town where Jessie and her husband (played by Peter Strauss) live. The director takes in the bucolic splendor and says, in her raspy downtown voice, “Canada’s such a peaceful place. It’s nice not to feel menaced, I think.”

To see her and Thomas on the set is to find how different a film can be when it’s not being run by a camera-wielding patriarch with a tortured soul. “This is my living room,” she says cheerily, waving me onto her territory. “Make yourself at home.”

Everybody but the actors are wearing face masks, due to the prodigious quantity of dust kicked up by the ancient bales of hay that litter the barn. It’s about the sixth take of a tough shot where Thomas, in a cumbersome nightgown, has to step on a rotten ladder rung at just the right moment, while young Courtney Cash remembers to notice Jamie’s ghost. A technician pumps away at a smoke-making machine jauntily labeled L’Intrigue.

Finally Grant cries out: “We got it.” Thomas slides down the ladder and does a happy little dance, exultantly agreeing: “We got it ALL: Children! Smoke! Nightgown!” They settle down for a little gossip while the technicians set up the next shot.

“I look over at Lee when I’m acting,” says Thomas, “and she’s glowing because she’s doing it along with me.”

It is a happy partnership, although Grant admits to a little actorish jealousy because “nobody’s taking pictures of me!”

But it’s a small price to pay, knowing that the picture they make together will be exactly the picture they want the public to see.

“Reunion” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS.