mother-daughter angst

Feb. 16, 2003 performance, by Frances Benn Hall

The only thing that might deter you from checking out Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary now running at the Barrington Stage Company’s new Studio Theatre in Sheffield is the title.

Although the word, according to my Oxford dictionary, has been around since 1620 and both Hawthorne and Charlotte Bronte used it, it is not a household one and merely means “alms giving” or “charitable.” And the noun, charity, is another word for love.

This play, revolving around the lives of three generations of women in one family, is concerned with the loving and fleeing from love that tangles human relationships. It is acted out on a bare, many layered thrust stage where in pools of light the three women struggle through their mother-daughter angst.

The death of Dorthea (Nancy Franklin) at age 75 opens and almost closes the play (there is a brief coda). The plot is also framed by a huge pair of white wings—the only prop or even “scenery” in this stream-of-consciousness play where time shifts rapidly and fluidly and not necessarily in chronological order as a character re-lives the troubling , but ultimately healing, events.

Artie, (Jennifer Jordon), daughter of Dorthea and mother of Echo (Vasti Poor), is caught in the middle and her role seems the hardest one. It is played with sympathy and sturdy defiance. She has escaped the zany optimism of her eccentric mother, but cannot push from her mind all the words, words, words implanted there. She has briefly known joy with a young husband who dies, and has not the courage to raise her own child, can only talk to her on the phone long distance, although she knows her child too is being taught from the cradle to fill her mind with words.

Echo, so renamed by her grandmother, lives in a whirl of letters of alphabets—American, Latin, Greek. She spells everything as though in doing so she could master her world.

At age l3 she wins the national spelling championship. As she gropes for meaning, she sadly comments, “There is nothing left to spell.” And she longs for a mother’s love—and touch. Her role demands great flexibility of voice and movement and Poor gives it to us.

How this plays out is worth a trip to Sheffield to see. Director Mira Hilbert has skillfully used the empty, layered stage space to advantage and wisely felt “less is more” in so fluid a play, avoiding props and scenery. Although the plot is also layered, it runs smoothly interweaving direct audience address with acted confrontations.

In this “winter of our discontent” with Berkshire weather and the tottering state of peace in the world at large, it is good to have a play that grapples with the issues of what it means to give and to love. The theatre is a tiny one; the play runs less than 90- minutes. It is well worth a trip to Sheffield.