Seascape

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SOURCE: "Seascape," in Modern Dramatists: Edward Albee, St. Martin's Press, 1987, pp. 115-28.

[In the essay below, McCarthy asserts that in Seascape, "Albee escapes the particular social contexts within which he normally writes in order to consider in a fundamental way the phenomenon we know as life and experience personally as existence."]

Long before the first performance of Seascape Albee teased his questioners over what it would contain. 'I'm moving from writing about people to writing about animals', he declared, and later described the play as a 'true to life story'. His audience could hardly have been prepared for the play they attended in January 1975. Many of the Albee ingredients are there. There is the married couple face to face with the problems of what is reality in their lives, and there is the intrusion of a second couple to create the quartet for which he writes so fluently.

When the setting is a holiday beach, and the atmosphere is one of love and seductive contentment, the scene seems strangely anodyne; but, when the crisis is provoked by two giant humanoid lizards crawling up from the primeval depths of the sea, then the result is something quite new. When he says that he is writing about animals Albee is teasing, but at the same time that is precisely what he is doing. Commentators who obstinately concentrate on the familial struggles in his plays ignore the fact that he writes in a wider context: a society, a way of life, even a species. Seascape is an important development in this process in that it treats the question of the future of the species.

It appears in the opening seconds of the play in a purely theatrical image that includes the seeds of much of what follows:

The curtain rises. NANCY and CHARLIE on a sand dune. Bright sun. They are dressed informally. There is a blanket and a picnic basket. Lunch is done; NANCY is finishing putting things away. There is a pause and then a jet plane is heard from stage right to stage left—growing, becoming deafeningly loud, diminishing.

Nancy: Such noise they make.

Charlie: They'll crash into the dunes one day. I don't know what good they do.

Nancy: (looks toward the ocean; sighs): Still … Oh, Charlie, it's so nice! Can't we stay here forever? Please!

There is the hint of apocalypse in Charlie's resentment of the noise and a yearning for a truer life in Nancy's delighted fascination with the seascape. (The same sort of combination of images is found in Elizabeth's dream of the holocaust in the final moments of The Lady from Dubuque.) From time to time the sound of the plane returns to over-shadow the events of the play, as they bring into perspective a view of life which Albee has not developed elsewhere on such a scale. There are suggestions of the dimensions to life as early as The Zoo Story, when Jerry explains that, to break out of isolation, some contact must be found:

it's just that if you can't deal with people, you have to make a start somewhere, WITH ANIMALS.

(Much faster now and like a conspirator) Don't you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with some-thing …

In Seascape Albee escapes the particular social contexts within which he normally writes in order to consider in a fundamental way the phenomenon we know as life and experience personally as existence.

The action of Seascape is elegantly simple. Nancy and Charlie are a warm, affectionate couple now entering their retirement. As they picnic by the seaside Nancy enthuses about the natural life around, and, wishing it were possible, innocently suggests that they should live always like this. Beside the sea. Always moving on in the sun.

One great seashore after another; the pounding waves and quiet coves; white sand, and red and black, some-where, I remember reading; palms, and pine trees, cliffs and reefs, and miles of jungle, sand dunes …

Charlie: No.

Nancy: … and all the people! Every language … every … race.

Charlie's refusal to consider Nancy's eccentric fancies is a contrast to the recollection she elicits from him that when he was a child he loved to escape down into the sea. Unlike his friends, who dreamed (significantly) of flight, he imagined himself 'a regular fish … fishlike arms and legs and everything, but able to go under'. As the couple reflect on their past life, including its moments of tension, a picture emerges of their fidelity and warm interdependence. The conflict appears now at the point where the children are grown—'nicely settled … to all appearances'—and the next generation has begun. Having done what they 'ought to do', they are at the point where they have new choices. As Nancy puts it, 'now we've got each other and some time, and all you want to do is become a vegetable'.

With the appearance of the two talking reptiles Sarah and Leslie, there is a more urgent confrontation. There is the threat of violence as the males face one another, but this gives way to the struggle they experience in explaining and, inevitably, evaluating what their lives are like. The climax of the play is produced as Charlie tries to explain how the four of them are part of a process of evolution. As he and Nancy attempt to explain the concept to their new friends, the images of life on land and in the sea are drawn together, and the truth emerges that what they are all involved in together is the progress of life. Charlie is moved, much to Nancy's wonder, from his inertia of the opening of the play to a demand that Sarah and Leslie accept emotion—which is expressed in the play as a feeling for the life in you. As the quartet weathers the storm of mis new emotion, the sea creatures are persuaded to stay and adapt to the new life they have encountered and help the unfamiliar creatures they recognise as their fellows.

Very often there is a distinct reminiscence of All Over, suggesting an alternative presentation of similar material. In All Over the family appeared synonymous with sterility and failure. This is reversed in Seascape. Nancy plays with the engaging image of the pyramid of succeeding generations. They have succeeded but she knows the risks:

everybody builds his own, starts fresh, starts up in the air, builds the base around him. Such levitation! Our own have started theirs! …

… Or maybe it's the most … difficult, the most … breathtaking of all: the whole tiling balanced on one point; a reversed pyramid, always in danger of toppling over when people don't behave themselves.

Nancy has lived her life looking forward. From the earliest days she wanted to be a woman: she wanted to grow up, un-like the Wife, who felt twelve years old when her husband came to her. There are two different values to the security the women see in their husbands: in All Over it is a security which involves an abdication in the face of life: in Seascape it is a progressive building, aware of the dangers but full of love and compassion.

The dangers are visible in the story of Charlie's seven months of depression, an episode which Albee invests with a particular richness of expression. At the heart of it is the idea of life as involving choice. The narration includes the choices that might have been: if Charlie had been unfaithful, if she had known other lovers; the consequences are worked out in the speech. Despite the fact that it all was not, Nancy learned and grew. 'The deeper your inertia went, the more I felt alive', says Nancy, and over the span of the narration the feeling for life is translated into the understanding present in a mature, even weatherbeaten, relationship. She recalls her mother's advice ('wise woman') and the stages of compassion: experiencing her own loneliness, and understanding his.

The picture is very much that of the Mistress in All Over and her compassion for her lover in, for instance, his loneliness on being separated from his family. Even the precision of language in the two characters is similar. Like the Mistress, Nancy insists on the importance of the tense of a verb: 'Am not having? Am not having a good life? … I know the language, and I know you. You're not careless witii it, or didn't used to be.'

In Seascape Albee writes with energy about the potential there is in life, which largely he invests in the role of Nancy. Against this comes intermittent resistance in the character of Charlie. In much of the action of the first act there is a contest between Charlie's theme—'Well, we've earned a little rest'—and Nancy's determination to avoid the 'purgatory before the purgatory': 'I haven't come this long way … Nor have you! Not this long way to let loose. All the wisdom—by accident, some of it—all the wisdom and the … unfettering.'

Albee finds the everyday phrase and exploits its deeper meaning. Charlie is 'happy … doing … nothing'. He spells out his conviction and the dramatist anatomises it in a 'testy' exchange between the two. As Nancy 'busily' tidies up and Charlie refuses to move, she challenges the absurdity of giving up on life:

We are not going to be around forever, Charlie, and you may not do nothing. If you don't want to do what I want to do—which doesn't matter—then we will do what you want to do, but we will not do nothing. We will do something.

There is a delightful comedy to this combination of the philosophical and the domestic, and it sets the tone for the play as a whole. In all his work Albee shows a fine inteligence, and the comic viewpoint is rarely far off. It is, however, rare to find the humour that there is in Seascape: a fundamentally positive sense of life which, together with the compassion Albee always exhibits, makes Seascape an exceptional piece of work.

The comedy gathers momentum with the appearance of the sea creatures and so too does the density of thought which is worked into the play. Albee manages a sustained flow of questions about social and individual existence through the agency of his monsters. Initially Charlie refuses to believe what his eyes tell him. The answer to these 'wonders'—and in his direction of the original production Albee required that they really be quite frightening—is characteristically to choose to believe in death:

We ate the liver paste and we died. That drowsy feeling … the sun … and the wine … none of it: all those night thoughts of what it would be like, the sudden scalding in the centre of the chest, or wasting away; milk in the eyes, voices from the other room; none of it. Chew your warm sandwich, wash it down, lie back, and let the poison have its way …

Nancy's reaction is to instruct Charlie to roll over like an animal and adopt a submission pose. Natural enough in the meeting of two sort of animals. Albee bridges his acts with this image of the lizards and the submitting humans, and it is a delightful piece of theatrical fun. Especially when the newcomers, who are reflections of the first couple, open the second act with a somewhat disdainful discussion of the panic they have provoked: 'Well … they don't look very formidable—in the sense of prepossessing. Not young. They've got their teeth bared, but they don't look as if they are going to bite. Their hide is funny—feels soft.'

What follows is a true comedy of manners. Charlie and Nancy have to negotiate every step of the way their exchanges with these imagined representatives of another line of evolution.

Sarah: This is Leslie.

Nancy (extending her hand): How do you do, Leslie?

Leslie (regards her gesture): What is that?

Nancy: Oh; we … well, we shake hands … flippers, uh … Charlie?

Sarah is delighted to learn of the gesture, whereas Leslie, who adopts Charlie's brand of negative rationalism, is un-convinced and wishes to know why it is done. When Charlie, progressively more involved, explains the significance of the proffered right hand, Leslie is equally defensive in his manner:

it used to be to prove nobody had a weapon, to prove they were friendly.

Leslie (after a bit): We're ambidextrous.

Charlie (rather miffed): Well, that's nice for you. Very nice.

The essence of the comedy lies in the wonder that each couple presents for the other, and in the parallelism that Albee devises to show up inflexibility, particularly of the males' position. In the females there is a parallel sense of wonder but an eager curiosity about what the new encounter may contain. Clothing and 'decency', for example, are concepts the scaly newcomers require to be defined, and Albee's idea drives a neat wedge between the human couple. The effect is to make comedy out of social manners but also to suggest the gradual awakening of Charlie from his somnolent attitudes to his wife and his life in general. Nancy teaches by the direct method and invites Sarah to see her breasts. To Charlie's great dismay Sarah, full of wonder and excitement, calls her mate Leslie to see. When Charlie objects, Leslie adopts a suitable nonchalance:

It's up to you; I mean, if they're something you hide, then may be they're embarrassing, or sad, and I shouldn't want to see them, and …

Charlie (more flustered than angry): They're not embarrassing; or sad; They're lovely! Some women … some women Nancy's age, they're … some women …

(To Nancy, almost spontaneously bursting into tears) I love your breasts.

With great skill Albee contrives a debate to combine the sharply differentiated reactions and characteristics in the four roles and a shifting discussion of various aspects of the new experience that the characters are called on to live. The subjects include marriage customs, flight and aerodynamics, child-bearing and rearing, and racialism. Albee establishes some hold over the form of the act by centring the conflicts in Charlie's progressive involvement. He makes one retreat into the negative rationalism he shares with Leslie when he staunchly reaffirms in the face of the facts that they are dead. Nancy explains

I mean, we have to be dead, because Charlie has decided that the wonders do not occur; that what we have not known does not exist; that what we cannot fathom cannot be; that the miracles, if you will, are bedtime stories; he has taken the leap of faith, from agnostic to atheist; the world is flat; the sun and the planets revolve around it, and don't row out too far or you'll fall off.

This prompts a most elegantly ridiculous routine as Leslie the lizard engages Charlie in a discussion of the nature of existence and the theories of Descartes

Leslie: Then I take it we don't exist.

Charlie (apologetic): Probably not; I'm sorry.

Leslie (to Nancy): That's quite a mind he's got there.

Leslie (to Charlie): You mean it's all an illusion?

Charlie: Could be.

Leslie: The whole thing? Existence?

Charlie: Um-hum!

Leslie (sitting down with CHARLIE): I don't believe that at all.

Like meets like in the encounter and Leslie's dogged pursuit of the discussions runs into Charlie's hysterical rage as he has to explain Descartes's Cogito.

Charlie is reassured of the physical fact of his existence by a particularly lengthy and passionate embrace from Nancy, and this, together with the lizards' panic at another passing jet, brings him finally face to face with the 'wonders'. Albee gives the stage direction 'Awe' at this point.

The creatures can be seen as a threat but they are an aspect of the wonder of life. They are animals with whom Charlie shares life and with whom he can make a society. Albee consolidates the shift in the role with Nancy's proud revelation to her new companions that there was a time when Charlie escaped from the world 'up here' by diving down to the bottom of the sea—unlike his fellows who wished to take to the air and, implicitly, join the noise of the jets. Charlie is uneasy at the reminder of his childhood curiosity: 'It was just a game; it was enough for a twelve-year-old, maybe, but it wasn't … finding out, you know; it wasn't real.' Yet the arrival above water of Leslie and Sarah is the parallel to the childhood Charlie. They are looking for somewhere to belong, despite the former ease of their everyday existence.

As Charlie finally emerges from his inertia, he discovers again the wonder of life and its sense of purpose and development. In his lengthy discussion of evolution the boundary between sea and air becomes a focus: 'What do they call it … the primordial soup? the glop? the heart-breaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultra-violets and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.' Charlie explains to them all that they are part of the same wonderful process of life: 'there was a time when we were all down there, crawling around, and swimming and carrying on—remember how we read about it, Nancy …

The sea-land exchange is crucial to Charlie's realisation that the four of them are united in all the implications of evolution from the 'aminos to the treble clef.

And do you know what happened once? Kind of the crowning moment of it all for me? It was when some … slimy creature poked its head out of the muck, looked around and decided to spend some time up here … came up into the air and decided to stay? And as time went on, he split apart and evolved and became tigers and gazelles and porcupines and Nancy here

Leslie (annoyed): I don't believe a word of this!

Charlie: Oh, you'd better, for he went back under, too; part of what he became didn't fancy it up on land, and went back down there, and turned into porpoises and sharks and manta rays, and whales … and you.

Charlie's vision includes them all as part of life and evolution. What is now vital is to know in what direction it is all going. Like the mirror couple they are, Leslie and Sarah react in opposite directions. Sarah asks if it is all for the better, Leslie tells her not to be 'taken in'. By the end of the play Albee has revolutionised the situation at the outset. Faced with a carbon copy of his own and Nancy's attitudes, Charlie crusades to convince the neophytes of the possibilities that lie before them: 'What are you going to tell me about? Slaughter and pointlessness? Come on up here. Stay.;

Albee doesn't sentimentalise the play at this late point; the role of Charlie is to remain sceptical, Nancy hopeful, but the alteration is into awareness and commitment. The man has been stung into life by the conflict with the inhabitants of the sea he loved as a child. His sense of wonder is once more awakened. The ultimate development of this is in terms of the tensions which the theatre can produce. Albee shifts the conflict to the plane of emotions. The translation is apt in ideological terms. The commitment to life can only be achieved by the recognition of the emotions which are proof of one's reaction to existence. Charlie provokes a final confrontation as he makes Sarah weep at the suggested loss of Leslie, and Leslie in his turn react violently in defence of his mate. Charlie's motives are stated clearly for the audience to understand:

(To Leslie and Sarah) I don't know what I want for you. I don't know what I feel toward you; it's either love or loathing. Take your pick; they're both emotions. And you're finding out about them, aren't you? About emotions? Well, I want you to know about all of it; I'm impatient for you, I want you to experience the whole thing! The full sweep!

As it stands, the play is concluded with the sea creatures coming to the arduous decision that they will stay on land when the painfulness of the experience they have been through seems too threatening. The final gestures of the play are touching but finally quite unsentimental as the quartet recognise in each other a necessary confrontation with life and the need to live. It is a choice that can be faced with, literally and figuratively, a helping hand. Hands and foot-paws are extended in the closing moments of the play. This conclusion contains the elements which resolve the questions and the experiences of the play, but nevertheless this work remains Albee's Unfinished Symphony. He has made it clear that there is a third act, which will complete the form of the play. As it stands, the play may seem slightly unbalanced, as the emphasis of discovery has shifted to the sea couple, and the ideas of wonder which are so joyously exposed in Nancy's speeches at the outset are overtaken by the development of relationships between the members of the oddly assorted quartet. This does work as a resolution of the action, for what is clearly and warmly felt by the audience is the primacy of life and genuine emotion in the play. However, one cannot help hoping that Albee will keep his promise to restore the final act, in which the positions are reserved and the human couple take up the theme of Charlie's childhood dreams and descend beneath the waves to discover life as something totally new, strange and fabulous.

The decision to shorten the play and abandon the third act indicates in part Albee's desire to keep its effect fully under control. The final act would have depended upon a theatrical dissolve into the underwater scene, which would have been very demanding technically but also visually stunning. The spectacle of the lizards would have gone much further, with submarine encounters with sea creatures, including a fight with an octopus. (In this Leslie would have rescued Nancy but Sarah would have died in coming to Nancy's assistance.) The scenic effects in the unpublished third act show, like Tiny Alice, Albee's power of imagination, and it is revealing that he should have decided to cut the fantastic episide which was to conclude the play.

At a certain moment part of the play took place at the bottom of the sea. This was not necessary, it was too fantastic, and it was very difficult to realise a changeable set. Finally it was becoming a play centred on set changes.1

Albee's distrust of the merely decorative style of theatre against which he has struggled so energetically is revealed in this decision, and it supports the impression given by the present text of a play, which aims at a high degree of internal relevance and organisation of ideas and events. The extrapolation of the action into the third-act adventure would have been a justifiable pleasure for Albee to give himself as a writer. However, he has left the play now as a balance of the actual and the imagined in which the future is left to the audience and its reflection. The play therefore ends with an invitation: 'All right. Let's begin!' It is the positive image of the negative supplied in All Over, the companion play. That concludes with the end of a life and the eclipse of the possibility of change: 'All Over'.

Note

lNew York Times, 21 Jan 1975.

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