Willful Women, Home Truths

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ELEEMOSYNARY

by Lee Blessing

What kind of mother would expect her 15-year-old daughter to jump off a tower while strapped with wings to prove that mankind can fly? What kind of daughter, after being cowed by such a mother, would so quake at the parent- child bond that she would abandon her toddler to relatives and head off to Europe to teach? What kind of child, growing up as the object of battle between such willful women, would prove at once fiercer and more forgiving than either?

The Wesbrook women, Lee Blessing says in his haunting off-Broadway play Eleemosynary, are determined to be exceptional. The grandmother is a New Age visionary, the mother a science scholar blessed (and cursed) with total recall, the child a national champion speller who not only knows the shape of words but revels in their layers of meaning. (The play's coy title is a spelling-bee word meaning charitable.) Yet for all their brains, beguiling eccentricity and epic betrayal, the women are touchingly ordinary in matters of the heart. Every woman, and everyone who knows and loves one, will recognize too familiar truths in the dilemmas Blessing depicts: mothers who urge freedom but see children as a chance to fulfill their own thwarted dreams, children who adore their parents but feel compelled to compete with them or simply say no.

Blessing, whose Broadway and London hit A Walk in the Woods arrived on PBS last week and is to open this week in Moscow, again displays wit and charm. But here he provides a much more intriguing narrative -- full of time shifts, inner thoughts revealed, imaginary moments, even a flash-forward in which the now dead grandmother describes her search for "life after eternity." This complex material stays clear, thanks to adept direction by Lynne Meadow and remarkable performances by Jennie Moreau as the girl, Eileen Heckart as her tart-tongued grandmother and especially Joanna Gleason as the woman in between, the focal point of family guilt. Eleemosynary, which has ripened in regional productions, is Blessing's finest work, an enriching tale of sin, regret and forgiveness.