The term emotional incest would not be overstating the meddling/thwarting/blurred-boundary ickiness between granny Dorothea (Maureen Miko) and her daughter Artie (Kari Whitney). So it comes as little surprise that Arties relationship with her own daughter, Echo (Kayti Barnett), should be a minefield as well. “Eleemosynary” is one of thousands of words young Echo has mastered as she prepares for a national spelling bee. Her homicidal performance there puts all the subsequent spelling bee dramatizations to shame. (This play was written in 1985, nearly a decade before the novel Bee Season and the throng of bee movies that followed it.) Whitney makes some interesting, non-crowd-pleasing choices as Artie, playing her as a repressed academic, a studiedly charmless emotional Neanderthal stunted by (viewers choice) either a deficit of Dorotheas love or an overdose of it. Likewise Mikos Dorothea isnt what one might expect in a destructive matriarch. Her apparent light manner makes the psychological bloodletting all the eerier. Eleemosynarys epic content feels bigger than its one-act confines. The play depicts feminism as a two-edged sword, wounding its beneficiaries as savagely as its adversaries, especially during the transitional generation when theoretically all things become possible for women. When does wanting the best for your child become gross trespass? How can mothers engage without engulfing? For these and other intrigues, we forgive heavy doses of expositional monologue. (Ends March 15.) MARGARET FRIEDMAN
Wed., Feb. 18, 8 p.m.; Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Starts: Feb. 18. Continues through March 15, 2009
