Defying the Odds : ‘Mud Pies’ has overcome hurdles to get to the stage, including artistic run-ins and a risky casting strategy.

A collection of country songs, some written years ago. A few scenes created for a cabaret act. A risky idea that has actors in their 70s playing characters younger than 10. More than one “artistic difference.”

Usually from such elements as these springs an aborted project. But writer-director Lori Street-Tubert’s musical “Mud Pies and White Dresses” doesn’t seem to have anything usual about it. Inspired by both Street-Tubert’s brother’s rich range of songs and her affection for older people, this is a tale about a woman looking back across the span of her life and the choices she has made. It is also about perseverance and nearly not making it.

Here is a project that almost didn’t make it.

Sitting in a second-row seat in Group Repertory Theatre, where “Mud Pies” opens tonight, Street-Tubert recalls the time when an unidentified (and since fired) director wanted to tweak the musical “and turn it into ‘Oklahoma!’ I would listen to what was happening and wouldn’t even recognize my own show.” Or the time when the unidentified (and since fired) choreographer wanted to change the set to accommodate some new moves.

She even had a dispute with Group Repertory’s artistic director, Lonnie Chapman, regarding the best friend of “Mud Pie’s” central character, Sunny. Merry, the ever-optimistic pal who stays in California while Sunny must move to Texas with her family, ends up being a scientist.

“I disagreed with Lonnie on Merry,” says Street-Tubert, who nevertheless went along with his suggestion. “I wanted her to be a wife at home, but he thought she needed to be a ‘90s kind of woman.”

This is one female playwright who has no qualms about writing female characters who stay at home--such as Sunny, who falls hard for a sexy Texas cowboy named Mearl. But Sunny also finds that he’s her biggest problem; he cheats and drinks, yet he passionately loves her.

“I loved the idea of having a girl going to Texas, get married and then get lost there,” says the 40-year-old first-time playwright. “But more than anything else, what I want audiences to notice is this tableaux of five strong elderly women opening the show, then going back to the start of their lives, then following them through their lives. By the end, I hope you forget where we started, and you’re startled to see them as older people.”

Street-Tubert knows the question coming next: Can we really accept older actors playing schoolgirls? “Absolutely, and you know why? Because these actors make you believe. Take someone like Nora Meerbaum, who plays Gale, Sunny’s sister. She is totally committed to the age difference, the behavior change. She does it so age becomes meaningless. It just . . . works.”

This risky casting strategy is based, Street-Tubert says, on a stanza in the show’s opening song by her brother Rob Simbeck:

There once was a young girl, mud pies and white dresses

And a woman who worked factories and farms.

A young lover, hot kisses, and tender caresses,

And a mother with a babe in her arms.

And all of these women are still here inside me

Even at seventy-four. *

“I’ve always gravitated to older people,” Street-Tubert says. “I choose to go swimming in my apartment building pool at 10 a.m. because that’s when the elderly are in the pool, swimming and having fun. I adore sharing their energy and experiences.”

The mainspring for “Mud Pies” was a set of shows Street-Tubert produced at Los Angeles-area senior centers, where she sang and performed and saw impressive elderly entertainers: “There were incredible talents who could be on ‘The Tonight Show.’ What happens to these people? Where do they go?”

She answers her own question: “They’re disposed of.”

Simbeck, a former songwriter and now author, explains by telephone from Tennessee, where he lives, that he “never, never ever” anticipated that his songs would be packaged inside a book musical. Written over a 20-year period, the tunes both pushed Street-Tubert to set some of the musical’s action in Texas (“all those cowboy songs, y’know”) and Simbeck to refashion some of them to fit the show.

“I’m influenced,” says Simbeck, “by artists like John Prine who’ve used country as a basis, but injected everything from folk to pop to flavor the songs, all with a strong, reflective, poetic sense.”

After Street-Tubert devised scenes for a Group Repertory cabaret show in 1992, she began adding more to the skeletal show. She then asked her brother to look at nearly 120 songs he had written or co-written, with his longtime partner Frank Michaels, as well as with Sharon Spivey, Patti Ryan and Grammy Award-winner Shandi Sinnamon.

“Lori had always liked my songs, which flattered me,” says Simbeck, 42. “But since she developed this show organically from the start, I wasn’t actively involved in the selection of specific songs. When I finally heard what she had put together, it was as if I had been painting all my life, and Lori had made a stage scene with the canvasses and turned them into something new.

“I had been skeptical that anything whole could be made of putting these songs together, but what she’s made gave me a new view of her as a creative artist, beyond her own performing talents.”

Street-Tubert, a native of tiny St. Marys, Pa., attended Point Park College, whose affiliation with the Pittsburgh Playhouse helped her gain early professional experience, leading to such stints as the national tour of “Sugar Babies.” But “Mud Pies” is the first serious writing she’s done in years. And now, after the conflicts and chancy casting notions, Street-Tubert says: “I’m so much at peace with it. I almost let it become other peoples’ work, but kept it my own, and now, if it falls, it falls because of my own doing.”

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WHERE AND WHEN:

What: “Mud Pies and White Dresses.”

Location: Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 3 p.m. Sundays. Indefinitely.

Price: $12.

Call: (818) 769-7529.