It's been a long time since I've seen a play as bleak and unrewarding as Eleemosynary, the Lee Blessing groaner currently being offered by Jobsite Theatre. I'm a sometime fan of Blessing's work — I loved Independence at Gypsy Productions last season and Chesapeake at American Stage a few years ago. But Eleemosynary, about a spelling-obsessed young girl and her dysfunctional mother and grandmother, more resembles Blessing's Two Rooms, a bore of a play that was staged a few years ago at Sarasota's Banyan Theatre.
Eleemosynary lacks suspense, it lacks depth, it contains about three ideas and works them to death for more than an hour. I've had better times hearing an emergency test on the radio or watching Mitt Romney defend his flip-flops on Meet the Press.
Even though the three actresses in Eleemosynary do a pretty good job, it doesn't make for a satisfying experience. Blessing has given them so little to accomplish, and so much to express repeatedly, that one eventually comes to blame them for the mind-numbing redundancy of their parts. I've got nothing against pessimism in the theater; from the Agamemnon to Glengarry Glen Ross, the negative view of life has been presented with great power and insight. But Eleemosynary, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. Or to cite another writer, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, it doesn't pass the most basic test: It's not an improvement over the empty stage.
Eleemosynary — the word, used in an onstage spelling bee, means "relating to charity" — is about three generations of Wesbrook women: grandmother Dorothea, mother Artemis and daughter/granddaughter Echo. Blessing plays with time throughout the play, but the plot — if you can call it that — revolves around three ideas: Dorothea's eccentricity, Artemis' refusal to be present as a mother to Echo, and Echo's mastery of the dictionary as part of her quest to be the best speller in history. Almost everything that happens on stage illustrates these or certain corollary facts, such as Echo's repeated appeals to her mother to have contact with her or Dorothea's delight in raising Echo herself. For example: We see Dorothea trying to teach Artemis to fly (how eccentric!) or claiming to have met President James Monroe (how eccentric!) or investigating levitation (how eccentric!). Dorothea even tells us why she became an eccentric: that way she wouldn't be held responsible for anything she did.
Then there are Artemis' repeated cross-country escapes from her mother and daughter, and Echo's interruption of the "action" to spell exceedingly unusual words — a refrain that's charming at first but becomes tiresome by the umpteenth odd term. Still, Echo has the distinction of being presented as a sympathetic character, whereas Dorothea and Artemis are utterly self-involved, blind to the needs of the people around them and featuring virtually no redeeming traits. What's also disturbing about these two older women is that they seem to be examples of some 19th-century antifeminist polemic: They're cerebral (Artemis is an important research scientist) but at the cost of their sexuality, generosity, humanity. Artemis might be a Strindbergian attack on woman-with-a-mind: Intellect has perverted her and so she maliciously teaches her daughter the wrong names for things (calls the floor the ceiling) and fobs off the pitiable little girl on anyone who'll have her.
Dorothea's cold and vain, and seems not to have the slightest sense of the harm she does to the people who depend on her. If Blessing intended this play as a feminist celebration of "unwomanly" women, I'm afraid he accomplished the opposite: These damaging egoists (Echo excepted) are anyone's nightmare, male or female. Next to Dorothea and Artemis, Hedda Gabler is a budding Mother Teresa.
As I said, it's particularly hard to distinguish the acting in such a play from the roles being enacted. Should the women playing Dorothea and Artemis have introduced notes of kindness and sanity into characters written as viciously self-serving and neurotic? Probably not. So perhaps I should praise Caroline Jett for finding every self-loving, self-promoting bone in Dorothea's body and Leah LoSchiavo for making Artemis an epic washout as a mother, daughter and human being.
Fortunately, Echo, as written, is a viable object of our sympathy, the victim of the other women and a pathetic seeker of human warmth. And Molly Jacobson does a wonderful job of showing us one mixed-up kid who's still human enough to need a normal family and whose focus on spelling difficult words is largely harmless and even a little ingratiating (not her fault that Blessing didn't know when to stop). Directors Kari Goetz and Jaime Giangrande-Holcom nicely manage to move us around in time and space with little confusion, all with the eloquent help of Karla Hartley's impressive lighting. But Matt Lunsford's set — centering on two huge books lying on their sides and making a platform — comes to feel a little too sparse in a play that cries out for some sort of fullness.
The uncredited costumes are fine, though: Dorothea wears an attractively coordinated brown ensemble; Artemis wears khakis, and Echo wears jeans. Everyone wears glasses, which I guess is supposed to further identify the women as thinkers.
It's not sufficient. The modern drama is full of dysfunctional families, anti-heroes and -heroines, and uncompromising views of the defects in human nature. But usually these factors are elements in some greater vision of our condition. The characters of Eleemosynary are so narrow, however, so crabbed and two-dimensional, they're more annoying than representative. The play is depressing not because its personages are failures but because Blessing doesn't find in their failure anything significant, anything with greater resonance.
He even under-dramatizes themes like Artemis' scientific successes, as if he's afraid they might balance her character and make her more human. The result: at least two caricatures. And Echo is not far from caricature.
Eleemosynary: The most interesting part of it is the title.
And it's downhill from there.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2008.