Eleemosynary
No matter how inquisitive, no matter how intellgent, no matter how pioneering a person is, this is no guarantee of success when it comes to dealing with one’s family. In Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary, three generations of superior discourse and familial discord come into play, a triptych of fraught mother/daughter relationships and a vast inherited intelligence that isn’t enough to bind them. Yet in an honest look at human victories and shortcomings together, director Yasmin Jeffries finds plenty to smile about amid the tense and lonely landscape of this ambitious UDM Theatre Company drama.
Structurally, the story is told out of order, weaving back through several timelines at once in a sly and intelligent narrative, but chronologically, it begins with family matriarch Dorothea (Stephanie Nichols). In the true present of the play, the grandmother is comatose after suffering a stroke, but not even this can suppress her impulses to provide commentary and impart all her knowledge and recollections to anyone within range. Her adult life is defined by an eccentricity she wears like a crown, allowing her to pursue metaphysically complex research problems and keep out from under the thumb of the men who would otherwise make decisions for her. In the role, Nichols easily communicates the true wonder and vigor that propel Dorothea always to learn and teach — so fervently that she cannot see how her own dominant will is fostering similar instincts for escape in her own daughter.
The play’s closest and most functional relationship is between Dorothea and granddaughter Echo (Autumn Thiellesen), her greatest student and a preteen spelling savant. The young woman’s relationship with words transcends letter to encompass the sound and feeling of the verbiage; it also provides a tie between Echo and her estranged mother, an absence Thiellesen treats with a skilled combination of reluctance, helplessness, and suppressed bile. Interestingly, the actor handles the heavy emotional lifting in scene work more comfortably than she does in candid narration, which finds notes of uncertainty or discomfort at the edges. It’s a minor falter in an otherwise fearless and warmly open performance.
The missing piece, as she might even classify herself, is Artie (Karen Kron), daughter to Dorothea and mother to Echo. As the dramatic crux of the tale, Kron projects a sense of lifelong failure that rings in dissonance with her intelligence, confidently wry demeanor, and career success. This undercurrent goes far to explain how Artie could spend most of her adult life frantically putting as much literal distance as possible between herself and her mother — even to the point of surrendering her own child for her mother to raise. This Artie, it seems, can handle anything except the smothering shadow of Dorothea’s idiosyncracies and high expectations (which betray interesting parallels to the kind of strictures Dorothea rebelled against herself). Their contentious, irreparable, somber relationship deftly reflects, then repeats, the anguish of a person realizing that the type of parent she wants to be is what her child most reviles. Throughout a story arc that tragically confuses running from with running to, Kron leaks cynical humor into her solitary character, but is just as effective in a crushing climactic scene.
The action is capably supplemented by video projections (produced and edited by Mikey Brown; directed by Jaffri) at the very rear of the stage; the large space is filled out with agreeable horizontal-planed pattern work by scenic designers Mark Choinski and Melinda Pacha. Lighting design (also by Choinski) follows through on Jaffri’s tendency to segregate rather than flow the nontraditional narrative, requiring performers to step in from darkness onto their marks; moreover, blackouts between clearly defined scenes — and a ten-minute intermission (in a production that barely exceeds ninety in total) — lend a chapter feel to a deliberately meandering story, allowing both the performers and the viewers to periodically recoup. Even so, this Eleemosynary balances these little object lessons regarding the silly, embarrassing pallor of events past with a resonant overarching theme of family, and the recurring consequences of our similarities and struggles.
October 7, 2011