Death and Life: Seascape
[The essay below examines Albee's "persistent concern with dramatizing what may occur if the human spirit withers. " The critic further asserts that in Seascape, "Albee is not writing merely about the naturalistic evolution of the human species, but about growth patterns of humankind, about combining the visceral and the intellectual into a new whole which is the consciously aware person. "]
Albee's theater challenges those who, as the playwright has said, "turn off" to the complex business of living, who "don't stay fully awake" in relationships, who for various reasons choose not to immerse themselves in an "absolutely full, dangerous participation" in experience.1Seascape once again reflects those thematic concerns to which Albee continually gravitates. In Seascape he explores three interwoven forces: animal nature, as imaged by the sea lizards Sarah and Leslie; human nature, as reflected by Nancy and Charlie; and the kind of existentialist imperative forged by the curious intermixing of the animal world with the human world. The audience discovers Albee's response to the fact that so many people turn off. Originally titled Life, the play reconfirms Albee's ongoing battle to stage the various kinds of ethical problems with which his heroes struggle, whether they know it or not—or even care to know.2
The design of Seascape seems simple enough. Nancy and Charlie are vacationing at the beach, where they have finished a picnic. They are relaxing, reminiscing, figuring out what they will do with their lives now that their children are grown and their own years are numbered. They give voice to different selves and motivations, but during their encounter with the sea lizards their purposes ultimately unite, fixing on a shared consciousness concerning, to go back to Jerry's words in The Zoo Story, "the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too."3 Their new-tempered awareness, as seen throughout the Albee canon, objectifies Albee's central concern.
Charlie contends that they have "earned a little" rest from the hectic business of living.4 Nancy, however, rejects this notion. In spite of their successful marriage Charlie and Nancy, currently on the threshold of beginning a new life——retirement—disagree on the way in which they will live out their remaining years. As in so many of his earlier plays Albee again joins opposites as a method of producing dramatic tension. Charlie is passive and inert, Nancy active and alive. Charlie elects withdrawal, while Nancy seeks engagement. He resists, she persists. She acts as a kind of benevolent instructor, he as the indifferent student. Charlie is tired of living, seems bereft of emotion, while Nancy is eager to investigate new terrain, willingly embracing change. Both clearly want to relax, but their interpretations of relaxation clash. Nancy craves to use their new free time by traveling along the world's shoreline as "seaside nomads" (5), exploring the wondrous sights of the earth. For Nancy life becomes meaningful when one lives it. She may have, in her older age, slight physical handicaps, but she does not suffer from the disabling psychological wounds that paralyze so many Albee protagonists. Albee shows her exuberance, enthusiasm, and spiritual vitality:
I love the water, and I love the air, and the sand and the dunes and the beach grass, and the sunshine on all of it and the white clouds way off, and the sunsets and the noise that shells make in the waves and, oh, I love every bit of it, Charlie.
(5)
The first act presents Nancy's optimistic stance toward living, as the tonal quality of her language suggests. Unlike the tonal quality of language in, say, Counting the Ways and Listening, which seems so tortured that the act of viewing or reading often becomes difficult, the language in Seascape emanates a lighthearted, humorous quality. Nancy voices this quality. For example, as her rapture with travel dreams continues, she exclaims to her lethargic husband, "My God, Charlie: See Everything Twice!" (10). Albee's thematic point centers on portraying a wife concerned with her husband, with loving attempts to revitalize his spirit.
Charlie resists. He has "to be pushed into everything" (7) because, as he informs Nancy, "I don't want to travel from beach to beach, cliff to sand dune, see the races, count the flies" (8). Retirement for Charlie means he can rest—and do nothing. He seems in many ways reminiscent of Peter in The Zoo Story, Daddy in The American Dream, Tobias in A Delicate Balance, and the Son in All Over, for Charlie also elects to withdraw from authentic engagement: "I'm happy … doing … nothing" (8). More than retiring from work, Albee suggests, Charlie is retiring from life itself, his spiritual laziness a willful surrendering of self-freedom.
Charlie defends his position. Claiming that Nancy's adventuresomeness would lead to "some … illusion" (38), he believes that "there's comfort in settling in" to doing nothing (39). After all, Charlie argues, "I have been a good husband to you" (31), and this is apparently true. He courted and loved Nancy, and fathered her children—just as she desired. By all accounts he has been faithful and forthright, the dependable provider and parent. From his point of view, Charlie has earned the right to do nothing. For him the choice to withdraw suggests that the whole affair of traveling, of being alive like Nancy, is too bothersome. If in functioning in a middle-class society, if in his efforts to uphold appearances, Charlie's vitality has diminished, it has clearly been his own conscious choice.
His attitude disturbs Nancy. They have not earned a little rest but, counters Nancy, "We've earned a little life, if you ask me" (37). She appears determined to begin anew, in qualitative terms, their life together. Nancy advocates what for the author is an important existentialist tenet when voicing her desire to experience life as fully as possible. Specifically she is aware of the finiteness of their existences: "We are not going to be around forever, Charlie, and you may not do nothing" (9). Nancy's zest for living, her impulse to respond, may remind the audience of Henry James's Lambert Strether, who, in The Ambassadors, confides to Bilham: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?"5 Like Strether, Nancy feels her old age on a physical level but refuses to capitulate on a spiritual level; she too wishes to "live all you can." Because of her insight Nancy appears objectively open toward experience, and will try anything, as long as they "do something" (9). Her zest for living takes on a larger, more compelling dimension because her stance is not a product of philosophic intellection but emerges from the concreteness of her conviction to experience fully her surrounding. Even years ago when, just married, Charlie slipped into a period of psychological withdrawal from both Nancy and life itself (his "seven-month decline"), Nancy felt a driving impulse to live. As she said, "The deeper your inertia went, the more I felt alive" (21).
Albee dramatizes Nancy's passion for life throughout the play. This is comically as well as seriously presented when Nancy catches Charlie speaking of their relationship in the past tense. Nancy ardently believes that they are having "a good life," not that, as Charlie sometimes states, they have "had a good life" (34). For Nancy and Albee alike, it is more than semantic nitpicking. Rather, it points to a whole way of being. Charlie rationalizes, perhaps convincingly, that "it's a way of speaking!" but Nancy objects: "No! It's a way of thinking!" (35). Nancy exclaims that they now have "two things!" (36) left, namely, "ourselves and some time" (37). Aware of the significance and precariousness of these two precious elements—the self and time—Nancy squares her hopes on experiencing qualitatively the world external to her self. She appears innately opposed to the Tobias-like acquiescence that can neutralize the individual's impulse to live.
In the midst of their conversation during the waning moments of act 1 Nancy and Charlie encounter the two anthropomorphic, green-scaled sea lizards, Sarah and Leslie. At this point Albee begins accentuating Nancy's and Charlie's differing attitudes toward experience. He objectifies this difference by the couple's initial reaction to the sea lizards: Charlie panics, Nancy beckons. While he issues a call to arms—and brandishes a feeble stick—she gazes at the two creatures in awe, saying "They're magnificent!" (44). As the two imposing, curious sea lizards approach, Nancy takes peaceful command, assuming a submissive pose. Finally Charlie takes heed, holding his fright in check.
What follows, as in so many Albee plays, is the interacting of two distinct yet clearly related worlds—here represented by the human world and the animal world. The reader or viewer has witnessed this technique of joining two contrast ing worlds before in the encounter of Peter and Jerry in The Zoo Story; in the contrast of Grandma's earlier values versus the newer values of Mommy and Daddy in The Sandbox and The American Dream; and in the meeting of the secular and the religious in Tiny Alice. In Seascape the yoking together of the human world and the sea lizard world provides a clear definition of Albee's thematic interest: that love and sharing and awareness are all necessary forces, forces to be integrated into one's inner reality if one is to live life honestly. But unlike some of Albee's earlier works, especially All Over, Seascape emphasizes the presence of love and sharing and awareness. In Seascape the bringing together of opposites—humans and sea lizards—does not produce illusions, deceit, or hatred. And it does not produce a Pyrrhic victory in which consciousness is gained, but with such terrible losses—alienation, suicide, murder, death— that the value seems dubious. Rather, the joining of Nancy and Charlie's world with that of Sarah and Leslie generates understanding, education, sharing, and love, perhaps at the cost of merely two bruised male egos.
Act 2 embodies the education of the characters. It starts simply enough, with Leslie and Sarah asking a barrage of questions ranging from the banal to the profound. As Charlie's fear and Nancy's confusion wear away, as Leslie's skepticism and Sarah's apprehension subside, the characters establish communication. As the difficulty of the questions increases, Nancy and Charlie fumble with imprecise expla-nations regarding birth and children—as when Nancy notes that humans keep their offspring for eighteen or twenty years because, she tells the uncomprehending sea lizards, "we love them" (86). Pressed to explain what love signifies, Nancy replies, "Love is one of the emotions" (87), to which an impatient Leslie retorts, "Define your terms. Honestly, the imprecision! You're so thoughtless!" (87). The two humans struggle to elaborate and to educate their companions about human life, as their reliance on abstract concepts suggests. But abstractions do not adequately account for the richness and complexity of actual experience. A frustrated Charlie turns the tables on the sea lizards by asking them about their past. What follows ostensibly concerns the sea lizards' account of their courtship. Through their honest and humorous tale of courtship, however, Sarah and Leslie reveal very humanlike emotions: love, hate, anger, hurt, jealousy. Leslie fought to win Sarah's affection; and this show of commitment forever united them, as Sarah remembers: "And there he was… and there I was … and here we are" (90). The exchange emerges as a point of illumination. For now Charlie provides a graspable illustration of the emotions and the way in which they function. He succeeds in making the abstract concrete.
Of all their discussions, from prejudice and bigotry to aerodynamics and photography, one topic appears crucial to the play. Nancy and Charlie have been discussing tools, art, mortality, those qualities and things which separate man "from the brute beast" (126), and again the concept of emotions, particularly love, surfaces. Charlie, miffed at Leslie's presence but wanting to show him the concrete reality of love, turns to Sarah. He pointedly asks what she would do if she lost Leslie. Her response:
I'd … cry; I'd … I'd cry! I'd … I'd cry my eyes out! Oh … Leslie!
Leslie (Trying to comfort Sarah): It's all right, Sarah!
Sarah: I want to go back; I don't want to stay here any more. (Wailing) I want to go back! (Trying to break away) I want to go back!
(129)
Here is Sarah's sudden experience of terror, her sense of aloneness, her understanding of the possibility of profound loss. The precariousness of her life with Leslie suddenly made real, Sarah is, for the first time, experiencing an awakening. Sarah's dread brings forth Leslie's emotions, and in the only violent scene in the play he attacks Charlie, the instinctive response to terror:
Leslie: You made her cry! (Hit)
Charlie: stop it!
Leslie: I ought to tear you apart!
Charlie: Oh my God! (Leslie begins to choke Charlie, standing behind Charlie, his arms around Charlie's throat. It has a look of slow, massive inevitability, not fight and panic)
(131)
While communicating (and fighting), the characters reveal one of Albee's basic concerns in Seascape, namely, the importance and process of evolution. For the playwright is clearly rendering what occurs, in part at least, when the species evolves into a higher form of life. "Like Arthur Miller's somewhat similar allegory, The Creation of the World and Other Business," observes C. W. E. Bigsby, "Seascape is best regarded as a consciously naïve attempt to trace human imperfection to its source by unwinding the process of history and myth."6 Sarah explains that their evolutionary process was caused by a sense of alienation: "We had a sense of not belonging any more" (116). As with most complex growth patterns, Albee suggests, their evolution did not occur in an epiphanic moment but developed over a longer period of time, reflecting a gradual coming to consciousness. In Sarah's words, "It was a growing thing, nothing abrupt" (116). This is not to suggest, however, that Seascape celebrates a naturalistic evolution, that it is simply a Darwinian pierce dramatizing the advancement of the saurians. Rather, the impact of Sarah and Leslie's realization of their estrangement from their familiar environment radically altered their perceptions not only of place, but of themselves within their natural place. Although she finds it difficult to articulate, Sarah still persists in her efforts to define their "sense of not belonging," even over Leslie's objections:
… all of a sudden, everything … down there … was terribly … interesting, I suppose; but what did it have to do with us any more?
Leslie: Don't Sarah.
Sarah: And it wasn't … comfortable any more. I mean, after all, you make your nest, and accept a whole … array … of things … and … we didn't feel we belonged there any more. And … what were we going to do?!
(116)
Leslie and Sarah have experienced the divorce between man and his environment that Albert Camus described as the "feeling of absurdity."7 They have been experientially forced to question the whole of their existence. Further, the passage illustrates Albee's deft interweaving of a serious subject within a lighthearted context. In spite of the humor permeating much of the play, the scene presents the characters as quite earnest because Albee stages the effects of alienation. But whereas in the earlier plays alienation typically begot more estrangement, even death, here it gives way to a sense of belonging, a sense of community. Even a stubborn Charlie begins lowering his defenses, becoming shy one moment, enthusiastic the next, all in an effort to understand the sea lizards' process of evolution.
The theme of evolution continues with Nancy and Charlie's explanations. Charlie, for example, reflects on the origins of humankind, linking the sea lizards' home with his own environment:
What do they call it … the primordial soup? the glop? That heartbreaking second when it all got together, the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.
(118)
Besides suggesting a mere biological interpretation of humankind's development, Charlie and Nancy also connect human evolution with the sea lizard's animal evolution:
Listen to this—there was a time when we all were down there, crawling around, and swimming and carrying on——remember how we read about it, Nancy?
(118)
The comments transcend a report of biological history, for they also operate on an archetypal level, unifying the animal world with the human world. As Charlie figuratively sums up to a skeptical Leslie and a fascinated Sarah, "It means that once upon a time you and I lived down there" (119). Nancy carries on the discussion, saying that the primitive creatures of long ago necessarily evolved to a higher plane of existence because "they were dissatisfied" (121) with their lives, just as Sarah and Leslie were not "comfortable" any more with theirs.
The reader, of course, sees the parallels between the worlds of the two couples. As Sarah voices her displeasure with their lizard life "down there" (117), so Nancy voices her dissatisfaction with their human life on land. As the women are open and enthusiastic, the men are closed, skeptical. Both couples throughout the drama are upset by the loud jets that fly over the dunes. The two couples come to recognize and appreciate the similarities between their worlds, and through their questioning and answering they learn about much more than the biological origins and evolution of the species. In Albee's presentation they also learn about the evolution of the spirit.
The evolution of the spirit draws the two couples intimately together. Nancy and Charlie, and Sarah and Leslie not only play counterpoint to each other but also mirror each other. Sarah's confession that they "considered the pros and the cons. Making do down there or trying something else" (117) directly mirrors Nancy's admission that her life with Charlie needs reevaluation too. If Leslie exemplifies brute bestiality, Charlie's actions at times reflect precisely such animalistic behavior. Like their sea lizard counterparts the humans must try "something else" if their lives are to avoid the potential stagnation inherent in "resting" too much. What this means, Albee implies, is that they should immerse themselves in the shape and energy of experience itself.
In A Delicate Balance, Claire mentions the value of developing gills as a way of adapting to and surviving life. But for Claire and most others in A Delicate Balance such evolutionary capability functions as a means of coping with a confusing, puckish reality. The subterfuges in A Delicate Balance are not present in Seascape. Here humankind's ability to evolve, to use "gills" when needed, becomes necessary if the individual is to grow. Charlie argues this very point when discussing the value of one's capacity to evolve:
Mutate or perish. Let your tail drop off, change your spots, or maybe just your point of view. The dinosaurs knew a thing or two, but that was about it … great, enormous creatures, big as a diesel engine——(To Leslie) whatever that may be—leviathans!… with a brain the size of a lichee nut; couldn't cope, couldn't figure it all out; went down.
(123)
Albee further develops the connectedness of the humans and sea lizards when Charlie describes his boyhood immersions in the sea. Nancy even asks if he developed a fishlike form: "Gills, too?" (13). In one passage in the play Charlie lapses into a pleasurable recollection:
And I would go into the water, take two stones, as large as I could manage, swim out a bit, tread, look up one final time at the sky … relax … begin to go down. Oh, twenty feet, fifteen, soft landing without a sound, the white sand clouding up where your feet touch, and all around you ferns . . . and lichen. You can stay down there so long! You can build it up, and last … so long, enough for the sand to settle and the fish come back. And they do—come back—all sizes, some slowly, eyeing past; some streak, and you think for a moment they're larger than they are, sharks maybe, but they never are, and one stops being an intruder, finally—just one more object come to the bottom, or living thing, part of the undulation and the silence. It was very good.
(16-17)
As Sarah and Leslie explore the solid earth, so Charlie, years ago, explored the sea. In both contexts sea creatures and humans are "eyeing past" each other. Thematically, Charlie's recollection of his submersion into the water directly correlates to the obvious archetypal patterns embodied in Seascape.8
Returning to the sea, archetypalists tell us, is one way for man to reestablish a rapport with the natural cycle. It also symbolizes man's attempt to reestablish contact with his own psyche. Carl Jung wrote: "Water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche."9 Although as a boy Charlie could not intellectualize about his water experience, his account suggests that the immersion concretely placed him within his own dark psyche. In Charlie's account living on the surface was equated with "breakers" and "a storm, or a high wind"—chaotic forces which affected his external world. But "to go way down" to the cove's bottom, living underneath the surface, was equated with solitude and calming silence. Seeking adventure and a comforting refuge, Charlie established an intuitive, sympathetic correspondence with his self and the underworld. Jung discusses the influence of this kind of immersion:
The unconscious is the psyche that reaches down from the daylight of mentality and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous system that for ages has been known as the "sympathetic." This … maintains the balance of life and, through the mysterious pathways of sympathetic excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost life of other beings but also has an inner effect upon them.10
In his underwater experience Charlie was privy to just this form of unique "knowledge of the innermost life." Thus, on an archetypal level Charlie's submersion allowed him to be present to his inner self, his hidden self, as well as to the world external to himself—the ocean world. Charlie's archetypal water experience serves as a rite of passage, a form of initiation into a primordial setting that precedes any capacity to evolve. In Jung's words, "The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent."11
But where is Charlie's "ascent"? Apparently his psychic ascent came long after his physical surfacing. As a teen-ager he came in touch with his inner psyche (16), but integrating the meaning of this experience is only achieved a lifetime later. In his unique encounter on the dunes Charlie rekindles contact with the natural cycle and with his self. Leslie and Sarah, of course, represent that vital contact. They represent what Charlie and Nancy were "eons" ago (117). As Lucina P. Gabbard points out, Leslie and Sarah "concretize the evolution of mankind from water animals, the emergence of the individual embryo from its watery womb, and the return to consciousness of the repressed self."12 Thus, the random encounter of the two couples on the dunes symbolically reveals the connectedness of animal nature and human nature, the biological as well as spiritual kinship which ex ists, at least in this play, between beast and human.
The intermingling of the animal and human world in Seascape, finally, precipitates an existentialist imperative which has become a familiar trademark of any Albee play: the need to communicate authentically with the other. Through mutual communication the characters of Seascape evolve into what Jung calls a "higher consciousness."13 In a state of higher consciousness Nancy voices one of Albee's central concerns in the play, saying, "And I'm aware of my own mortality" (125). Passing middle age, Nancy feels the nearness of death. For Charlie the nearness of death remains, like his childhood experience, distant. Only when Leslie nearly strangles him do Nancy's attitudes become tangible to Charlie. Through their collective experience the characters begin to understand and live with, in Albee's words, "the cleansing consciousness of death."14 That is, the characters gain an acute awareness of the proximity of extinction, of the finiteness of their existence, which in turn creates the possibility for living life fully, as Nancy advocates throughout.
In spite of the evolving spirits of the characters, the mythical uniting of brute beast with civilized person, Albee does not formulate a purely fairy-tale ending: there is no guarantee that their lives will be substantially changed. Sarah, for example, shyly voices her concern surrounding evolution: "Is it … is it for the better?" and Charlie can only reply honestly: "I don't know" (124). The tentativeness evident in Charlie's response, like George's "maybe" to Martha's questions at the close of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? captures something of the precariousness of their newfound knowledge. But they discover that, with each other's compassion, they can help each other. As Leslie says in his play-closing line, "All right. Begin" (135).
If the couples learn anything during the play, Albee suggests that it involves the recognition of and the need for involvement, engagement, and love at a consciously aware level. Through their explanations of their respective roles on earth the couples come to view themselves in a larger context. If the sea lizards have much to learn about life "up here" (132), so, too, with the humans. Their struggle only highlights the archetypal circularity fusing the animal and human worlds. Nancy and Charlie realize that they are not "better" but are, perhaps, "more interesting" than animals (125); that they are but a more-developed link on the physical and spiritual evolutionary chain. Albee implies that through the sweep and play of evolutionary patterns human-kind has transcended noble savagery and the instinctive response to nature, to become beings whose mentor increasingly is reason. Surely the power of reason, Albee would say, is useful, necessary; still, in Seascape the dominance of rational faculties poses a threat. The danger is that, with rationality triumphing over the instinctive, the primordial life-giving passions will dissipate, and, for Charlie at least, there will be no other source of vitality to replace them. Unless reason and the emotions exist in counterpoise, more will be lost in the wonders of evolution than gained. Albee implies that evolved humanity will cease to feel deeply, or, continuing to feel at all, the individual may care only for the wrong things. Perhaps this is why Albee has called Seascape "triste."15
Seascape, which opened on 26 January 1975 at the Sam S.Shubert Theatre, New York City, and which won Albee his second Pulitzer Prize, represents Albee's persistent concern with dramatizing what may occur if the human spirit withers. Here Albee is not writing merely about the naturalistic evolution of the human species, but about growth patterns of humankind, about combining the visceral and the intellectual into a new whole which is the consciously aware person.
Notes
1Matthew C. Roudané, "An Interview with Edward Albee," Southern Humanities Review 16 (1982): 41.
2Bigsby,318.
3Edward Albee, The Zoo Story and The American Dream (New York: Signet, 1960) 39-40.
4Edward Albee, Seascape (New York: Atheneum, 1975) 10. Page references within the text are to this edition.
5Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Norton, 1964) 132.
6Bigsby 318.
7Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1955) 5.
8For elaboration of the archetypal patterns in Seascape, see Thomas P. Alder, "Albee's Seascape: Humanity at the Second Threshold, "Renascence 31 (1979): 107-14; Lucina P. Gabbard, "Albee's Seascape: An Adult Fairy Tale," Modern Drama 21 (1978): 307-17; and Kitty Harris Smither, "A Dream of Dragons: Albee as Star Thrower in Seascape," Edward Albee: Planned Wilderness, ed. Patricia De La Fuente, (Edinburg, TX: Pan American University Press, 1980) 99-110.
9Carl G. Jung, "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," Twentieth Century Criticism, ed. William J. Handy and Max R. Westbrook (New York: Free Press, 1974) 215.
10Jung 217.
11Jung 216.
12Gabbard 308.
13Jung 230. For further discussion of the role of consciousness in the play see Liam O. Purdon, "The Limits of Reason: Seascape as Psychic Metaphor," Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays, ed. Julian N. Wasserman, Lee Lecture Series, University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983) 141-53.
14Edward Albee, The Plays (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1981)1:10.
15Matthew C. Roudané, "Albee on Albee," RE: Artes Liberales 10 (1984): 4.
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