Appreciation of Lee Blessing’s play ELEEMOSYNARY probably depends upon how intriguing one finds eccentrics.

If a little old lady babbling on about meeting President James Madison on her walk this morning sounds endearing, then this may be just the play for you. But to those of us who find such prattle tedious, this play can seem much longer than its 90 minutes.

“Nobody holds an eccentric responsible,” says the little old lady, thus justifying what seems to me an acute case of self-centered offspring exploitation.

Rhona Gold and Rachel VanWormer.

^{Courtesy photo: Chelsea Whitmore}

Her three sons seem to have been dismissed from her life so she could concentrate her fantasies on her only daughter who, having been stuffed with every kind of knowledge except the facts of life, gets knocked up by the gardener. Following the abortion, she flees life as an exhibit and pretty much turns in a fugitive.

The daughter melts a bit upon the birth of her own daughter and informs mom. Mistake. The old lady shows up the next day, buying the house next door and starting to teach the Greek alphabet to her three-month-old granddaughter. Given a opening, the daughter bolts again, trading her freedom for her child. And that’s where we find the action of the play, with the old lady dying and the next two generations, permanently warped, opening next-step negotiations.

There’s no lack of resources. Daughter has become a famed, if eccentric, biochemical researcher and Granddaughter, approaching eccentric puberty, is the national Spelling Bee champion. Eccentricity fantasies usually involve only gifted individuals.

Love? There’s considerable talk of such, but the word is used to mean some combination of respect and responsibility. All self-centered.

(By the way, Blessing has the girl endlessly babbling about the sensual beauty of her spelling words as she caresses many a jawbreaker. But at least one of words – “ththisis,” if I heard correctly _ hasn’t yet come to the attention of the Oxford English Dictionary.)

For Moxie Theatre, Chelsea Whitmore has steered an ill-matched cast smoothly through the play’s sketchy dreamscape, ignoring the selfish obsessions and concentrating on the wistful emotional byproducts. That the solo speeches work best is partly the playwright’s fault and partly the director’s achievement.

Conversations clunk and grind because it’s so hard to see these three as related.

Rhona Gold plays the grandmother with firm, stolid power, borrowing heavily from the grand Jewish matriarch tradition. Julie Anderson Sachs is vague and WASPy as the daughter, supplying no firm clues to help solve the character’s dogged detachment.

And Rachael VanWormer, familiar now from many a featured role on local stages, presents bright-shining precocity again with the same set of tricks that have served her so well. There’s no way to complain about a VanWormer performance, just a nagging speculation as to whether she will branch out from the adorable gifted scamp before audiences tire of her.

Angelina Ynfante designed the Moxie production with reasonable efficiency and Karin Filijan provided the appropriate lighting.

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM HERE