STAGE REVIEW : ‘Daytrips’ to the Rhythm of a Disease

Yes, there are rules about constructing a play. But the great rule--as Jo Carson clearly realizes in “Daytrips,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center--is to be true to the experience that inspired the play.

Find your shape there , and you’ll produce something original. “Daytrips” is just that. I can’t remember a play with a more painful subject. Yet the subject is looked at with composure and even humor, everything implied by a word we don’t hear much these days: acceptance.

The subject is Alzheimer’s disease, and the toll that it exacts on a family is not minimized. We see the daily effort of coaxing one’s mother to put her arm into her sweater, meanwhile suffering a disjointed lecture from her about how you steal all her best outfits.

Months of that, and worse, and you are ready to murder her. “Daytrips” minces no words about this.

In fact, its heroine has two problems on her hands, her mother and her grandmother, not so far gone in her confusion, but confused enough. And ornery as hell. If there were a way to put them both out of their misery, the granddaughter would do it.

Would she, though? The play leaves the question open. In fact, it leaves the situation open. This is not a Disease-of-the-Week melodrama, building to a courtroom finale. It’s a study of mothers and daughters, women who don’t walk away from each other, no matter how little they may think of each other. “I’m all she’s got” is a declaration of intent here, not a whine.

Carson has no idea what will happen to these three determined women. Her interest is to show what is happening between them now--the heavy stuff of the present emergency, plus the normal static between mothers and grown-up daughters, plus some ghostly business from the past. (A real ghost: The play happens in the South.)

Rather than speeding from checkpoint to checkpoint, Carson lets her tale proceed in a circular way, sometimes doubling back to the past. There’s always movement, but there’s no stress. The play has time for its people, as big-city plays don’t always have.

Director Steven Kent understands its rhythm, and his actors find freedom within it. Julianna McCarthy does not play the grandmother as a cute old lady. She plays her as a tyrant--a force that has to be dealt with. She also lets us (but no one else) see the childish fear behind that force.

And she lets the grandmother be funny. But don’t you dare laugh at her! It’s a wonderful role, a role that Jessica Tandy is going to want to know about. (This play isn’t going to stop at LATC.) But the grandmother will never get more understanding than she gets from McCarthy.

Anne Gee Byrd has to be very alert as the mother, whose mind keeps flickering and sometimes connecting. Now she’s a fractious animal; now she’s the generous and funny woman that she used to be. Byrd makes her all of a piece, and therefore heartbreaking.

The daughter is played by two actresses, fittingly, since she’s got so much on her plate. Victoria Ann-Lewis takes care of the narrating duties, plus stepping in when a subsidiary character is invoked; and Christine Murdock does the heavy lifting, with as much humor as she can summon. Alzheimer victims can be funny. They are never fun.

We wonder about the daughter. Doesn’t she have any private life? If we pay close attention, we learn that the daughter isn’t actually the mother’s primary care-giver, but is spelling her father, a character who may deserve more of a role in the story.

Even so, it’s a strain. Why does she do it? Honor, maybe. But don’t look for any speeches about that. Douglas D. Smith’s set and lighting tell us that this is to be a fluid, intuitive kind of play, with no abstractions--a play about the dailyness of things. Those who have had to be care-givers will recognize “Daytrips” and those who haven’t will get a sense of the fortitude required. But it is not a play with a message. What you remember is its flow.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Nov. 19. Tickets $22-$26. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599.