Alice Roosevelt (Mary Bacon, left) arrives late for her rendezvous with Cousin Eleanor (Trezana Beverley) at the family’s Sagamore Hill home in Ellen Abrams’s Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts.
It’s amazing how Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, and her first cousin Eleanor, renowned wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), sustained a relationship for more than six decades, given their polar-opposite dispositions. Blood is not necessarily thicker than water, and yet these two disparate personalities—the former, a socialite and senator’s wife, and the other, a political force and humanitarian in her own right, do not sever ties. Eleanor and Alice: Conversations Between Two Remarkable Roosevelts, Ellen Abrams’s new play about that relationship, deals with these celebrated women’s close camaraderie from childhood through FDR’s death.
If tragicomedy were an accurate way to describe the ordeals that both Roosevelt women faced during their lifetimes and their respective attempts at resilience, then it would be prudent to label the play’s genre as such. Frances Hill’s direction effectively balances the impact of both tragedy and comedy, particularly with reference to Alice’s vicissitudes. It seems that despite all of Alice’s bravado and proud insistence that “my specialty is detached malevolence,” her life was truly tragic. As much as she loves shocking her cousin and everyone else with her socially inappropriate and politically incorrect comments, revelations (e.g., the adulterous liaison that produced her daughter Paulina), and pretensions that her brother Ted would make a better president than FDR, Alice lives in Eleanor Roosevelt’s shadow—that is, except for Alice’s cutting sense of humor.
Alice (Bacon, left), emphatically tells Eleanor (Beverley), “Of course, I can drive!” as she is the President’s daughter. Photographs by Tanja Hayes.
The cousins are visually situated in the enchanting turn-of-the-century Teddy Roosevelt retreat at Oyster Bay, where Alice lives a life of privilege and relative narcissism and Eleanor, as visitor, alternately indulges her cousin and later faces off against Republican Alice’s political outbursts and somewhat irrational diatribes against her progressive cousin, Democrat Franklin. The warmth of the physical environment created by set designers Madeleine Burrow and Jamie Terrazino is a figurative buffer against the women’s conversations when they transition from just mutual excitement to Alice’s sometimes brutally frank and sometimes inflammatory rhetoric. The period costumes by Gail Cooper-Hecht not only accentuate the women’s differing physiques but the fact that Eleanor puts more emphasis on her good deeds than her haute couture and body shape.
The show’s projections by Kim T. Sharp artfully contrast the women’s attitudes and philosophies of life. Here’s Alice’s take on herself: “I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of an individualist. Well, a show-off anyway.” Compare this with Eleanor’s perspective: “A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water” and “I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.” And yet somehow, these women not only coexist, but bond.
Mary Bacon as Alice is wickedly funny as the antithesis of society’s good girl. In contrast with Eleanor’s slow, incremental transformation from girlish giddiness over her cousin Franklin to a more measured and circumspect demeanor—which Trezana Beverley as Eleanor masters—Alice acts like an outspoken hothead frozen in time. Bacon deftly demonstrates Alice’s “failure to launch” to maturity until she is older and faces multiple losses. First, there is her marriage to an alcoholic, philandering husband. “I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury,” she quips.
“Frances Hill’s direction effectively balances the impact of both tragedy and comedy.”
Only when Alice’s loss of her husband, Nicholas Longworth, is compounded by her daughter Paulina’s overdose (after which Alice raises her granddaughter Joanna), and her beloved brother Ted III dies in Normandy, does one truly sense the pathos in her life. Should Bacon’s Alice hint to us a bit earlier in the play that her outrageous behavior is slated to mellow a bit with age? Perhaps, but regardless, with ever-evolving loss and brotherly political aspirations that come to naught, Alice’s transformation is bound to be sufficiently sobering.
Alice’s cousin and foil Eleanor is a study in growth and maturity despite losses and disappointments. She survives a family legacy of alcoholism, the death of her relatively young parents and younger brother, FDR’s affairs with Lucy Mercer and other women, and his medical tribulations after contracting polio. Eleanor is gracious, beneficent, and socially responsible. She overcomes those obstacles and develops a strong identity. Her own political and social awakening and subsequent activism transpire independently of her husband’s travails and leadership during the dark days of the Depression and World War II.
In Abrams’s play, one is privileged to witness the birth of female statesmanship and sadly, resignation. Although Alice outlives Eleanor by more than two decades, it is Eleanor whose dedication to that which is beyond herself is the ultimate Roosevelt legacy.
Ellen Abrams’s Eleanor and Alice runs through April 30 at Urban Stages. Evening performances are Mondays and Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7 p.m. Matinees are Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. For tickets or for more information, contact the box office at (212) 421-1380 or visit urbanstages.org.
Playwright: Ellen Abrams
Direction: Frances Hill
Sets: Madeleine Burrow and Jamie Terrazino
Costumes: Gail Cooper Hecht
Lighting: John Salutz
Sound: David Margolin Lawson
Projections: Kim T. Sharp
