Theatre in Review: Eleanor and Alice (Urban Stages)There very well may be an engaging drama in the decades-long relationship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Indeed, they made for perfect frenemies: saintly, self-doubting Eleanor, dedicated to uplifting the downtrodden and promoting world peace, versus Alice, the ultimate Washington insider, a queen bee skilled in the art of character assassination; Eleanor, devoted to racial and economic justice, pitted against Alice, mesmerized by the pursuit of power. That they were yoked together as part of a great -- possibly the greatest -- American political dynasty is one of God's little ironies. They traveled the first half of the twentieth century on parallel tracks, possessed of radically different visions, eyeing each other skeptically. It's a true-life situation with considerable drama -- and more than a little high comedy -- embedded in it. Is Eleanor and Alice that drama? Probably not, although a different production might cast it in a more favorable light. Ellen Abrams has structured her play as a series of ladylike sparring sessions staged across seven decades. Early on, in 1904, Alice is on the ascendant, her father replacing his murdered predecessor in the White House. Empathy is unknown to her; as she gleefully tells a shocked Eleanor, "After President McKinley was shot down -- like a big, dumb bison -- in Buffalo -- [her brother] Ted Junior and I ran on to the lawn right there...and we danced a jig!" Eleanor's ambitions are rather more modest: She is engaged to her cousin Franklin, although she wonders, fretfully, how such a handsome man can be attracted to her dowdy self. Alice has, strategically, set her cap for Congressman Nick Longworth, planning to separate him from his current lover. "Naturally, Edith says he drinks too much," she adds, throwing shade on her unloved stepmother. By 1920, relations are growing tense. Alice and Ted Junior have done their best to sabotage Franklin's vice-presidential prospects in an election won by Warren G. Harding. Even worse, Alice knows all about Franklin's affair with Lucy Mercer; she has even hosted them on the sly. (Alice, whose marriage to the charming, hard-drinking Longworth can best be described as transactional, can't imagine why Eleanor is making a federal case out of a little extramarital fling.) In any case, Alice is convinced that her side of the clan -- the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, don't you know -- will inherit the White House, while Franklin, whom she has nicknamed "feather duster," is doomed to obscurity. Eleanor retreats from this scene, unsettled, for good reason; so heartless is Alice's attitude, one marvels Eleanor doesn't give her cousin a good, swift kick in the posterior. Which, really, is the trouble with Eleanor and Alice: As presented, one can't imagine these women inhabiting the same country, let alone the same sitting room. Alice's sour wisecracks only grow more rancorous with the years, making Eleanor's forbearance virtually impossible to understand. As framed here, they're panelists in an endless point-counterpoint debate, each offering sound bites about war, isolationism, economics, and the United Nations. They make their arguments neatly enough but there's no real clash of ideas, in part because their relationship has little psychological reality. To be sure, there's drama to be found in their sharply different responses to adversity: Eleanor, a First Lady in years of economic disaster and war, dedicated to helping her husband cope with infantile paralysis, becomes a figure of global consequence while Alice, seeing her family's political prospects fade and her brothers self-destruct, devolves into a Washington eccentric, best-known for her bitchy remarks. (Defending herself after Franklin has banned her from the White House for saying said she'd rather vote for Adolf Hitler, Alice says, "Everybody knows my specialty is detached malevolence.") But Abrams never makes much of these rich possibilities; the ladies remain in their separate lanes all night long. The play's weaknesses are exacerbated by Frances Hill's production. Mary Bacon (Alice) and Trezana Beverly (Eleanor) are formidable actresses but the roughly three-decade gap in their ages is hard to forget, especially when the seventy-seven-year-old Beverly is portraying Eleanor at twenty. In a less naturalistic production, this might not be an insuperable problem; indeed, a reader's theatre approach might have been more fruitful, especially since, at the performance I attended, Beverly struggled a bit with her lines. Such a staging might also curtail Bacon, who, going for an Auntie Mame exuberance, tends to shout her dialogue with arms extended. And it would eliminate the elaborate costume changes that make for so much dead air between scenes. These lengthy pauses at least allow projection designer Kim T. Sharp to unfurl a panoply of evocative images, including wedding portraits, headlines, political cartoons, and social phenomena ranging from flappers to the Ku Klux Klan. If Gail Cooper-Hecht's costumes often feel a little hazy in terms of period, it can't have been easy to turn out so many outfits on a constrained budget. The scenery (by Madeleine Burrow and Jamie Terrazzino), lighting (by John Salutz), and sound (by David Margolin Lawson) are fairly basic. Eleanor and Alice becomes honestly touching in its later scenes, especially when both women confront their failings as mothers. Alice is the dubious prize winner, given the early death of her daughter Paulina Sturm at 32. Even if it wasn't a suicide, as Alice insists, the young woman struggled with depression and you won't wonder why: Offering an example of her maternal technique, Alice admits to choosing Paulina's wedding day for informing her daughter that her biological father was Senator William Borah, Alice's longtime lover. "I believe in brutal honesty. Always," Alice says at one point. This time, such honesty may have broken this rare object of her affection. In a way, the gulf, both ideological and personal, between the two women is a mirror of the contemporary American divide -- a global and humanitarian view versus a blinkered America First philosophy -- and it's too bad that Eleanor and Alice doesn't make more of it. The play is subtitled "Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts." One wishes that, once in a while, the ladies (especially Eleanor) would relax, let down their hair, and indulge in a little drama, too. --David Barbour 
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