Hallie Foote Cares for Her Fathers Orphans Home Cycle AFTER four years of actor training, Hallie Foote entered the family business on July 5, 1978. That night, at 28, she made her Off Off Broadway debut in "Courtship," a play written by her father, Horton Foote. She played Elizabeth Vaughn, a spirited Texas woman falling in love with a young man named Horace Robedaux - characters based on the playwright's parents, her grandparents. Since then Ms. Foote, now 59, has devoted herself almost exclusively to her father's work, including her Tony Award-nominated turn in "Dividing the Estate" last season on Broadway. And now she has joined a company of actors performing "Courtship" and eight other Foote plays in one of the most ambitious productions ever drawn from a writer's family tree. Before he died in March at 92, Foote compressed the nine plays - about 23 hours of theater - into the nine-hour "Orphans" Home Cycle," running through March at Signature Theater Company. This time Ms. Foote is playing Elizabeth's mother, Mrs. Vaughn (based on her own great-grandmother), as well as three other relatives. If keeping track of all of these characters seems difficult, Ms. Foote knows the lineage by heart. After her father's death Ms. Foote - the oldest of his four children - became the executor not only of his literary estate but also, unofficially, of the family history that inspired many of his plays, which include "The Trip to Bountiful" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Young Man From Atlanta." The roles of daughter, caretaker, muse and leading actress that she has played for her father have taken on greater resonance as she has worked to bring "The Orphans" Home Cycle" to fruition and enshrine her father as one of the great playwrights of the 20th century. "In a weird way, you spend your life protecting the person so he can write, but when he passed away, I was mindful of still trying to protect him as much as I can," Ms. Foote said in the living room of a Manhattan apartment where she and her husband, Devon Abner, another actor in "Orphans," are staying for the run of the show. "Dad always trusted my instincts, I think, because we just started collaborating more and more closely," she continued. People identify me with his work, and I'm very grateful that happened. But now I'm working to make sure that people identify Dad with how deeply good his work is. Theater critics have long credited Ms. Foote as the foremost interpreter of her father's plays, praising her buttoned-down and unsentimental performances of matriarchs, wives and widows full of frustration and longing. "The Orphans" Home Cycle" is, of course, an altogether different experience for Ms. Foote. No longer can she look out from the stage and see her father in the audience, his finger pressed to his lips, his eyes often closed, as if listening to the spirits from his Texas childhood - as he once described his experience in the theater to me. Now he is one of the spirits in the Signature Theater, and Ms. Foote is grieving her father through his work. Daisy Foote, Ms. Foote's younger sister, said that she was worried for Hallie after their father died. All four of Foote's children - including his sons Horton Jr. and Walter - were close to their father, but Hallie spent by far the most time with him, working on plays and taking him in to live with her and Mr. Abner in California after the death of Foote's wife, Lillian, in 1992 after 47 years of marriage. "Emotionally, I think I've ended up having the harder time with Dad's death, and I think that's because Hallie has been able to work through her grief by working on "Orphans" Home," " Daisy, herself a playwright, said in a telephone interview. "Just the other day Hallie told me, "I feel really lucky that I have these plays to go to every day." " The action of "The Orphans" Home Cycle" unfolds between 1902 and 1928 and is largely set in the fictional Harrison, Tex., based on Foote's ancestral hometown of Wharton, 60 miles southwest of Houston. The nine plays center on Horace Robedaux (based on Horton Foote's father) from the age of 12 through his 30s. They trace the death of Horace's alcoholic father, his subsequent abandonment by his mother and sister, his courtship of two young women - one of whom, Elizabeth, becomes his wife - and the tribulations of family, career, World War I and the flu pandemic of 1918. Four generations of the Foote family find their ways into the characters, including one named Horace Jr., age 10, a stand-in for the playwright himself. While some of the nine plays have been produced in New York or turned into movies - like "Convicts," starring Robert Duvall, and "1918" and "On Valentine's Day," starring Ms. Foote and Matthew Broderick - none made it to Broadway, and, to Foote's disappointment, four never received major theatrical mountings. In 2007 a frequent collaborator and close friend of Foote's, Michael Wilson, the artistic director of Hartford Stage, proposed a commission for Foote to adapt the plays into a three-part production that could run in repertory or on a single day of marathon performances. Ms. Foote recalled that her father "at first didn't know if the adaptation was really possible." The nine plays were not collected in his computer, and boiling down his autobiographical opus seemed daunting, she said. He was 91 at the time, and while family members say that his mind and writing gifts were in enviably good shape - and he was doing yoga three times a week - he was growing frail and prone to fatigue. Still, he said he would give it a try.