Word play

Searching for the charity in Lee Blessing's Eleemosynary

by Steve Vineberg

By Lee Blessing. Directed by Michael Walker. Set designed by Sarah Sullivan. Costumes by Ted Giammona. Lighting by Karen Perlow. With Sheila Ferrini, Judith McIntyre, and Rebecca Honig. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, Worcester, through January 30.

Lee Blessing's Eleemosynary is a three-hander about both the bonds and the distance between three eccentric women who represent different generations of the same family. Dorothea Wesbrook, married to a man with whom she feels no strong companionship, bears his children around the time of WW2 and then travels out on her own wavelength, experimenting with levitation and otherwise exploring the capacity of the mind and the spirit to manipulate the physical world. Her unwilling sometime-subject is her only daughter, Artie (for Artemis), who gets pregnant as a teenager and runs away after her mother pressures her to have an abortion. Artie becomes a biochemist and marries; when her husband dies in an accident, Dorothea finds her, moves in, and effectively takes over the raising of her granddaughter, Echo. She becomes Echo's only real parent when Artie moves away, leaving the child in Dorothea's care, and even after a new job brings her back she remains essentially estranged from her daughter, carrying on a telephone relationship with her as Echo trains to become a national spelling champ.

This oddball play is being given a careful, intelligent production by Michael Walker at Foothills, so your response to it will come down to what you think of Blessing's text. I'm afraid it left me cold and rather puzzled because I just couldn't track it. The play seems to take "eleemosynary" -- one of Echo's favorite words to spell, it means "charitable" -- and its (implied) antonym, "mean-spirited" or "withholding," as the two emotional poles for all three characters. Dorothea shows little emotional generosity to her daughter but either she's much kinder to her granddaughter or else Echo has a better instinct for how to respond to her; Blessing doesn't make it clear which is the case. Either out of grief at the loss of her husband or else an extended rebellion against Dorothea (or both), Artie pulls away from her own daughter, but, at the end, through Echo's determination, they manage to effect a reconciliaton. Echo reaches out to both her mother and her grandmother, but when she reaches the final level of the spelling contest her competitiveness has a savage edge; she doesn't just beat her opponent -- she demolishes him, and he feels the vindictiveness of her triumph. But at the end of the play Echo announces that all three Wesbrook women are "eleemosynary," and I don't know where she (or Blessing) got that idea from. Who behaves charitably in this play? No one except Echo even seems capable of an other-directed act; Dorothea seems to love others or withhold love for them based on the extent to which she sees them as extensions of herself, and Artie refuses to admit her daughter to her life until Echo doesn't give her the chance to do anything else.