Published Friday, January 25, 2008 1:58 PM
Updated Monday, January 28, 2008 8:48 PM

"Eleemosynary" takes stage this week

Main character Echo, an accomplished spelling champion, sounds out the word and provides its definition during the first scene. With that out of the way, you can begin to peel back the layers of a story director Charmaine Wozniak likens to an onion.

The one-act play, written by Lee Blessing, examines the relationship between three generations of the Westbrook women.

There's the matriarch, Dorothea (played by Bunny Johnson), whose oppressive upbringing led her to become an eccentric living vicariously through her offspring; and her daughter, Artie (Sarah Daniel), who tries to live outside the range of her mother's influence and, in the process, has left her own daughter, Echo (Jenny Parnow), in her mother's care.

Describing the play's narrative, Wozniak uses words like "fragmented" and "disjointed," but ultimately, she says, it's about the road less traveled.

"We're all presented with choices," she says. "Sometimes our parents steer us down a certain road, but we don't want to go down that road."

Wozniak says the family in "Eleemosynary" is extremely dysfunctional. With that in mind, Flowertown Players creative director Sean Lakey created a set with horizontal doors, nearly-inverted staircases and other skewed designs.

Lakey first looked to the melted clocks of Salvador Dali and the off-kilter work of Pablo Picasso for inspiration before settling on graphic artist M.C. Escher's so-called "impossible constructions."

"The angles alone hurt my brain," he says.

Everything on stage has a golden and bronze look. Wozniak says it's meant to suggest a sepia tone to help convey the feeling of time travel.

A projection screen suspended over the upper right corner of the stage also helps further the time travel concept. The cast and crew gathered at Flowertown executive director Naomi Chaitkin Nimmo's home to shoot a series of video clips, which appear throughout the play.

Despite her background in theater, Daniel says she had never filmed a part of her performance for a production.

"It was an adventure," she says.

Daniel and Parnow say they had total faith in Wozniak, Lakey and assistant director Greg Ivey as all of the play's visual components were being assembled.

"It kind of fit together like a puzzle," Parnow said.

Wozniak says the most important decisions were made before rehearsals ever began.

"You need to cast really well and we did," she says.  

Performances of "Eleemosynary" are scheduled for 8 p.m. Jan. 25-26, Jan. 31-Feb. 2 and Feb. 7-9 at the James F. Dean Community Theatre at 133 S. Main St. A Sunday matinee is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Feb. 3.

Tickets are $20 for adults and $17 for students and seniors. For reservations and more information, call (843) 875-9251.