LILLIAN, Goodman Theatre Studio. The most conventional, concentrated, and sentimental of the five monologues British writer-performer David Cale has brought to Goodman’s small stage is Lillian, seven vignettes covering seven years in the life of an endearing survivor who appeared in Cale’s 1993 Somebody Else’s House. Fortysomething when she tells this tale, Lillian compares herself to a late-blooming chrysanthemum. Several years earlier she took a randy, muscular young man named Jimmy as her lover. Their May-December relationship survives her divorce from a dour husband (doubtless hastened by her amorous episode with Jimmy), and at a Brighton resort she reunites with Jimmy, now 26 and married to Donna, a businesswoman. Jimmy leaves Donna, and he and Lillian impulsively marry. Jimmy gets his chance to be a gardener, but life has other plans, and Lillian is left to cultivate chrysanthemums that bloom all year long.
