Cast Makes ‘Eleemosynary’ Poetry in Motion

Lee Blessing’s plays have gotten more personal as the years go by. He began writing generic plays about his favorite subject, baseball, a biography of Ty Cobb among them. Then Blessing made a big hit with “A Walk in the Woods,” a very intimate view of two arms negotiators.

His current mood is even more personal, as seen in “Eleemosynary,” at the Vanguard Theatre in Fullerton.

This play delves into the interior lives of three women in the Wesbrook family, grandmother Dorthea, mother Artie and daughter Echo. “Eleemosynary” begins with Dorthea’s death, and like a breeze through a familiar landscape, wafts back and forth in time, guiding the viewer gently and rewardingly through the telling incidents of these extraordinary lives.

Wesbrook women, Echo says, are born with a desire to be extraordinary. When Dorthea was young, and daughter Artie only 13, Dorthea believed in unaided human flight, and strapped makeshift wings on her daughter. This beginning of Artie’s real scientific bent--as opposed to Dorthea’s flights of fancy--was the onset of a schism that lasted their whole lives, but wasn’t so deep that Artie couldn’t leave her own daughter, Echo, for Dorthea to raise.

Of course Echo became noteworthy on her own hook, deciding as a girl that she would be the best speller in the world, actually believing there was an adult spelling division she could follow later. She won the National Spelling Bee, but the event failed to break down the walls that separated all three.

The play wanders some in its objectives, but its insights are continually intriguing, and the even roll Blessing gives his action is generally seductive. Director Jill Cary Martin is very much in tune with the playwright’s intent, and she guides the three actresses impeccably through the maze of their emotional growth.

The central figure is Echo, played by Megan Beghtol with the boyish charm of a teenager who knows her own mind and is desperately trying to find her place in the emotional puzzle her mother and grandmother have created.

Sally Leonard’s Artie is just as intricate but correctly more reserved, and with a faint edge of fear in the face of two stronger women, her mother and daughter, who seem to have left her out of their lives. As the just slightly eccentric Dorthea, perhaps the most extraordinary of the three, Joyce Eriksen keeps wisely away from an Auntie Mame image, which the role might trick other actresses into, and gives Dorthea the right shadings of those wonderful women at the beginning of this century who were beginning to break the mold and become their own persons.

BE THERE

“Eleemosynary,” Vanguard Theatre, 699-A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends July 25. $13-$15. (714) 526-8007. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.