This bee started the buzz

By MARTY CLEAR, Times Correspondent
Published January 7, 2008

TAMPA - In the past few years, filmmakers have discovered that spelling bees offer fertile fields for drama. But two decades before such movies as Spellbound, Bee Season and Akeelah and the Bee, Lee Blessing wrote a poignant, intellectually satisfying play that cultivated that same ground.

A deliciously low-key staging by Jobsite Theater beautifully realizes Blessing's Eleemosynary.

A spelling bee provides the story's hook, but the play's heart is the relationships between a playfully eccentric woman, her resentful daughter and her precocious granddaughter.

The play is complex and beautiful, full of humor and memorable lines and characters, and it's enhanced here by powerful, delicate performances.

Molly Jacobson, an eighth-grader, has to carry a lot of the emotional weight, and she does so with remarkable confidence and depth. She plays Echo, a girl who realizes her dream of becoming the national spelling champion. ("Eleemosynary," which means "charitable," is her winning word.) But Echo's other goals escape her. She wants to establish a relationship with her mother, a cold woman who abandoned her, and to repair the damaged bond between her mother and grandmother.

Leah LoSchiavo, as the mother, has a deceptively difficult role. Her character is bookish, negative and emotionally closed; she's mean to her mother and deliberately distant from her daughter. But LoSchiavo imbues her with enough heart and pathos that we empathize.

As the grandmother, Caroline Jett faces an inverse challenge. Her character is irresistibly entertaining, described as "one of the notable eccentrics of her time," and Jett has to tone down the outlandishness to make her more real and less sympathetic. She does so, but never loses the twinkle in the eye of the life-loving character who talks to rocks and James Monroe.

Co-directors Kari Goetz and Jaime Giangrande-Holcom keep the actors, especially LoSchiavo and Jett, physically distant through most of the play. The few scenes in which mothers and daughters touch, or even speak face-to-face, become unnatural and awkward.

If you're determined to look for weaknesses, you can find a few. But given the excellence of the play and the production, they're hard to notice.

REVIEW:

Eleemosynary

The play runs through Jan. 20 at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Shimberg Playhouse, 1010 MacInnes Place, Tampa. 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday. $24.50. (813) 229-7827; www.tbpac.org.

[Last modified January 6, 2008, 23:25:12]