THEATER : A Family’s ‘Love Duet’ : Puccini’s music adds to dreamlike quality of story about aging mother and her daughter.

It all started in an Italian butcher shop in New York’s Greenwich Village, and it sounds almost Dickensian.

The butcher was abusive, and the vain mother was referred to as the Empress. Their youngest daughter, Sarah, was papa’s “whipping boy.” He used to tie her in a chair in the back room and beat her. Until she was 19 years old.

The story is true, and the eventual fallout, years later, from this wrenching beginning is the basis of Robert Rudelson’s drama, “Who’s Looking After the Baby?” which opened Thursday night at the Whitefire Theatre. Rudelson’s wife, Lelia Goldoni, is directing the production. And she just happens to be Sarah’s daughter.

When Sarah was 19, a charming, intellectual, well-known Italian actor named Charles de Rose visited her brother, who himself wanted to become an actor. De Rose saw Sarah, and she saw him. Ignoring papa’s violent wrath, they eloped into an extremely happy marriage, which thrived until their daughter, Lelia, was 18 months old.

Charles died suddenly, and forsaking relatives, Sarah brought the child to Los Angeles to build a new life.

Goldoni’s relationship with her mother during her last years, when Sarah was retreating into a fantasy world centered around Charlie, has been built into what Rudelson calls “a love duet.” It is not a musical, but he says the actors perform in duets and arias.

This “musical” approach comes partly from the fact that Sarah loved the music of Puccini and played it constantly. That led Rudelson into the quasi-operatic form of the play, which revolves around the aging Sarah, her adult actress daughter and the figure of Charlie, a ghostlike being whose existence has engulfed Sarah’s final years.

Goldoni explains, “It’s really like a journey of the soul. It starts off in a realistic way, and then slowly begins to become hyper-realism. What you’re seeing are dream sequences. The reality has an unreality to it.”

Rudelson says, “It’s the daughter’s tenacity and dedication that make the relationship work, because the mother is at a point where she’s incapable of finding a way through the maze back to her daughter, or back to the present moment in time.”

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Apollo Dukakis, co-founder of the Whole Theatre in Montclair, N.J.--with his sister, Oscar-winner Olympia--and producer of this production, agrees. “Anybody can identify with that in terms of universal things. I’m Greek, and I saw my mother in this woman. The swell of Puccini is the mother’s hopes and dreams that are unfulfilled. And the choice of incidental music reflects that, the longing.”

Rudelson’s writing includes screenplays, such as the Jason Robards Jr.-Katharine Ross film “Fools,” and British films and BBC teleplays. Goldoni, who began her career as a dancer with the Lester Horton Dance Theater, moved into a film career that includes “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and Richard Gere’s “Bloodbrothers,” and eventually into teaching and directing.

Director Goldoni feels no qualms about another actress playing her. She and Rudelson agree that the two actresses who share the evening with Al D’Andrea as Charlie’s ghost, couldn’t be nearer to the intent of the script.

Goldoni says the hardest role to cast was Charlie, because she only knew the legend of her father. The aging Sarah is played by Erica Yohn, currently seen as Don Ameche’s wife in “Corrina, Corrina.” Yohn also played Lenny Bruce’s mother in Broadway’s “Lenny” the same year that Janice Lynde, who plays Sarah’s daughter, was playing Eve Harrington in the musical “Applause” on Broadway.

Goldoni, as director, is able to distance herself enough from the story to perceive that what it says about a mother-daughter relationship is universal.

She explains, “Although the material is very specific to ethnic textures and tone, it has reverberations in all cultures. All the women I’ve known, they start telling me stories, and it sounds like this play. There are very strong themes in it that every woman, who’s either a daughter or mother, and we’ve all been at least one of those, share. People say, ‘I know that story, I know that woman.’ ”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Who’s Looking After the Baby?”

Location: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks.

Hours: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends Oct. 16.

Price: $15.

Call: (818) 503-2323.