'Grandma' has her moments 

Not Without Grandma is a mildly diverting original comedy-drama written and directed by Susan Price Monnot. As a playwright, Monnot has a tart but essentially gentle voice and a tendency to stretch her story out unnecessarily. The play would benefit from a knowing director to help trim her two-act, 12-scene, two-hour opus into a more compact entertainment and also provide more energy and pace. The play has its moments, but they're buried in too much verbiage and not enough action.

Monnot is not without talent, however. At the end of the first act, she creates a genuinely dramatic outcry of emotion that is then topped with a humorous line and both work. That kind of juxtaposition isn't an easy thing to bring off.

One of her themes here is the defensive tactics the elderly take to get by in life. It's the kind of plot that Harvey writer Mary Chase explored in a little-known play called Midgie Purvis, where a middle-aged woman finds it easier to pretend to be much older.

In Not Without Grandma, the title character, Flo, is a passive-aggressive biddy who has her daughter Lizzy and granddaughter April at her beck and call because she has them believing she's a semi-invalid. And the granddaughter's boyfriend has an apparently demented uncle who may not
be as daft as he lets on.

The mutually ennabling family of three women seems to at least to be functioning until Lizzy contracts terminal cancer just as April is accepted into medical school. April hires a caregiver named Mrs. Vinderbaum, who with her outsider's eye, sees things as they really are. Or is she a Teutonic Mary Poppins, who goes where she's needed and then moves on?

Some of Monnot's solutions are a bit pat, with a tacked-on feminist addendum that plays like a speech from a 20-year-old TV movie. But the playwright-director can also create real moments of theatrical
effectiveness, such as April's nightmare, when all her troubles close in on her in a dream swirl of voice-overs. And the play can be quite funny, because a sly old woman putting everyone down as she puts one over on them is fairly foolproof stuff.

Besides being too long, the play's main problem is that it's played too casually. When Donald Loupe as the maybe mental Uncle Matt appears, the audience perks up because he brings real vitality to the stage. The same thing happens when Vatican Lokey injects some brief comic life as a driving instructor.

Avis Conti's Grandma is a subtle, amusing old fraud, but it would be nice to see her put more bite into her insult comedy. The appealing Joy Chun makes April's anguish real, but she has to be careful not to slip into a whiney mode. Michael Miller exudes confident, boyish brio as George, April's beau who takes an awful lot of abuse only to be held at arm's length at the end of the play. Lisette Bayle plays both the fading Lizzy and the take-charge Mrs. Vinbderbaum, who bears more than a passing
resemblance -- in appearance and plot function -- to Robin Williams' "Mrs. Doubtfire."

Monnot has also supplied some catchy tunes that bridge her scenes, one of which, Remember When has an insistent French music hall feel to it. The play has been capably produced, with good light and sound contributions from Vic Woodward and costumes by Cindy Duplass which deftly chart the characters' emotional states.

Not Without Grandma is not without merit or charm, but like Grandma herself, it could use a good swift kick to get it off its duff.