A Review of the Criticism

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SOURCE: "A Review of the Criticism," in The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama, Northeastern University Press, 1980, pp. 113-35.

[In the following essay, Bernstein offers a survey of the theatrical reviews of Seascape, a critical analysis of the play, and a discussion of its place in twentieth-century American drama.]

A Review of the Criticism

Mixed critical reaction has greeted Edward Albee's Seascape. Such critics as Clive Barnes, George Oppenheimer, Richard Watts, and Brendan Gill have written of their admiration for the work; others, including Walter Kerr, T. E. Kalem, Stanley Kauffmann, Jack Kroll, and Catharine Hughes, have been equally emphatic in deriding it. Harold Clurman, who scorns the hysteria of the love or hate reaction of his colleagues, has a generally favorable reaction to the play. Although he calls it a "little" play, his tone indicates that he is surely among that group of critics who might "find [the work] delightful."1

Mel Gussow, in a New York Times interview with Albee, reports that Albee began to think about Seascape in 1967, seven years before it was produced. It grew out of one of two companion pieces, at that time called Life and Death. Death ultimately became All Over, produced in 1971, and Life became Seascape, to which Albee gave special attention for three years prior to its writing.

Gussow finds in Seascape, as in most of Albee's works, elements of both tragedy and comedy. During the interview, Albee credits Samuel Beckett with traits that may be credited to himself as well:

Our best serious playwright, Samuel Beckett, is extremely funny. You've got to have a tragic sense of life to see the humor of the absurd.2

As the Gussow interview indicates, Albee was indeed quite serious in this dramatic effort. He allegedly has always been fascinated by the sea; in addition, he read extensively in anthropology and animal behavior in preparation for the writing. However, Albee does not see simple scientific knowledge as his substructure. Gussow calls it "still very much a play of the imagination." Albee states that it was the most difficult play he has ever written because he had no guidelines and because language and diction were particularly acute problems. He had to make the lizards seem believable and yet decidedly different from humans. As Albee states:

They should be so real that in a sense we can smell them. They should be quite frightening. Seeing them for the first time, the audience should have that shock of recognition. After all, it's what we all were.3

However charming or witty the play might be, the Gussow interview indicates that Albee was attempting to confront weighty scientific and philosophical matters and to treat them in a fundamentally serious, though overtly whimsical, fashion.

It is precisely because of the seriousness of Albee's aim and posture that most of the criticism of the play has been leveled. In essence, a number of critics feel that Seascape is pretentious, dull, and pseudophilosophic; talky when it ought to have provided action; and abstract and distant when it ought to have conveyed intense feeling. Quite pointedly, T. E. Kalem of Time states that since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Albee's plays (including Seascape) have been "flaccidly somnolent affairs." Claiming that Albee has "a very weak gift for plot construction," he scores the characterization and language, refers to the play's "thudding banalities," and calls the work "bland and innocuous, a two-hour sleeping pill of aimless chatter."4 Similarly, Jack Kroll of Newsweek writes that Albee "seems drained of almost all vitality—theatrical, intellectual, artistic." Moveover, Kroll thinks that Albee has "committed the grisly error of becoming a 'sage.' "5

Catharine Hughes, who agrees with Kalem and Kroll that the play lacks "life," states:

As a course in elementary Darwinism, Seascape just might have some value. As a play, it is pretentious, simplistic, verbose and banal.6

Essentially in agreement, Stanley Kauffmann calls it hollow, banal, and unrealized. He goes on to suggest that Albee give up playwriting, since he has allegedly produced nothing of worth since Virginia Woolf.7 In a more moderate but equally firm critique, Walter Kerr argues that the play fails principally because it is not dramatic. The play begins with a long conversational debate between the middle-aged couple, Charlie and Nancy. In retirement, Charlie wants only to rest, while Nancy wants wonder and excitement. The couple is joined by two sea creatures, with whom they compare notes on many facets of their lives. When the sea creatures decide—inevitably, Kerr contends—to return to the sea, we have a crisis, but Kerr believes that Albee fails to present this crisis effectively. Since Charlie had formerly wished to surrender to old age and death, Kerr asks, "Why does he not engage himself, as devil's advocate, as newly enlightened human being, as something?"8

While the questions of dramatic effectiveness, philosophical richness, construction, and vitality are surely points of dis-agreement among critics, nowhere is the debate so pointed and acrid as it is on the subject of Albee's language. For example, T. E. Kalem writes:

Finally, he largely abandoned his strong suit, which was a flair for vituperatively explosive dialogue and bitchy humor. Instead, his characters have spoken for years now with intolerably stilted pomposity, as if they had wandered out of an unpublished work by some minor Victorian novelist.9

Similarly, Kroll censures Albee's "constipated language that moves in colonic spasms."10 Catharine Hughes, another detractor, states that Albee's writing "is presumed (by the author) to be poetic and profound, resonant, when in reality it is devoid of life and artificial, the producer of inertia."11

Although such judgments on Albee's language are powerful, they are not universally held. For example, Walter Kerr comments:

The writing is blessedly spare, free of the convoluted locutions that have sometimes grown like coral over [Albee's] meanings.12

Similarly, Brendan Gill writes in The New Yorker.

Of all Mr. Albee's plays, Seascape is the most exquisitely written. He has calculated not only every immaculate line of dialogue but every word, every caesura; when the actors fall silent, we hold our breath and wait, as we wait at the reading of some superb long poem.13

Clive Barnes and Henry Hewes are affirmative in their overall assessment of the play. Because of its warmth and human compassion, Barnes calls Seascape a true comedy, "a major dramatic event," and further states: "What Mr. Albee has given us here is a play of great density, with many interesting emotional and intellectural reverberations."14 Henry Hewes, agreeing that it is a comedy, praises Albee for his "wit," "insight," and "careful use of language." Although he believes that the first act lacks "dramatic urgency," Hewes concludes his critique by referring to Seascape as "a unique comedy—one that gives us more to think about than any other of this season's new plays."15

Harold Clurman seems to explain the differences in critical response to Seascape. He writes:

It is his most relaxed play, a "philosophical" whimsy. You may find it delightful, or, if the nice notion on which it is based does not suit your temperament, you will consider it a drag.16

The term philosophical whimsy suggests the light tone, the wit, and the playful creativity of language, idea, and theatrical image that Albee attempted to employ. If one disregards this graceful blending of light manner and serious matter, the work surely seems pretentious, the metaphor insoluble, and the language heavy. Seen, however, from the vantage point that Clurman suggests, we are compelled to open our minds regarding Seascape, as Albee suggested in an interview with the editors of The New York Times: "The most important thing you can ask from an audience is that it approach a new play with an open mind—without having predetermined the nature of the theatrical experience it will accept."17

While the detractors say little more of the play than that it is concerned with a troubled middle-aged couple and that it is concerned scientifically (or pseudoscientifically) with evolution, the play's supporters have attempted various interpretations, each more or less related to Albee's contention that the play is "a true-to-life story."18 ' For example, Clive Barnes claims that the play confronts life itself—its history, processes, and current expression in the human conditionand optimistically reminds us about "the primeval ooze from which we all came, and the blind, inarticulative courage that keeps us all going."19 ' Oblique but related is the interpretation of Henry Hewes:

Albee seems to be suggesting that the real solution is for our civilization to recognize its failures and somehow to feed our experience into the evolution of a new and better species.20

Brendan Gill concludes:

Boldly and simply, it asserts that, at no matter what age and in no matter what time and place, acts of discovery remain to be undertaken. With luck, such acts will be found to have meaning; better still, there is the possibility that they will bear fruit.21

Regardless of which critical opinion we adhere to, we would do well to ponder Clurman's judgment that Seascape "is a step in Albee's still green career, a step which, seen in a certain light, augurs well for the future."22

In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Seascape, Albee won the Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award, given by the Dramatists Guild Council, for the 1974-1975 season.

This award "is given to a playwright whose work deals with a controversial subject involving political, religious or social mores."23

A Discussion

Edward Albee's Seascape, produced in 1975, won the Pulitzer Prize for that year. The tenth Albee play to be produced (the thirteenth if we include his adaptations), the work reassures us that Albee is still a powerful force in American theatre. Many critics have felt, throughout the course of Albee's career, that his most recent play would be his last. The notion that Albee had played himself out arose shortly after the production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it was repeated for the next ten years and received new support in 1971 when All Over, which was concerned with death, seemed to state explicitly (in its title and symbolically throughout) that this would be the last Albee play. But Albee stunned critics and audiences again in 1975 with the production of Seascape. Hailed by Clive Barnes as "a major dramatic event," Seascape is of double significance. First, it reminds us that Albee is alive and well and writing superbly. More importantly, his winning a second Pulitzer Prize (he had won it in 1966 fox A Delicate Balance) affirmed his right to claim such a well-deserved honor, denied him for Virginia Woolf in 1962. (Because of the 1962 denial, John Mason Brown and John Gassner withdrew from the Pulitzer Prize Committee.)

Seascape is a two-act play concerned with a middle-aged couple, Nancy and Charlie. The setting is an isolated beach to which the couple has come for a vacation. The first act is largely a dialogue concerned with the couple's finding ways both to fill the emptiness and to combat the loneliness that have entered their lives. Basically, Nancy wants a life of excitement and new adventures, wandering from one secluded beach to another; Charlie wants simply to rest, to do absolutely nothing.

The first act begins with the deafening roar of a jet airplane passing overhead. This sound, which annoys and interrupts the couple's dialogue, is heard three times during the first act. It serves as a contrast to the quiet calm and pristine beauty of the sand dunes, and serves to remind us of the world outside the isolated beach. After the plane's initial roar passes, Nancy and Charlie debate whether to spend the remainder of their lives beachcombing and seeking adventure or to rest and let the years pass by uneventfully. Although the dialogue continues for a long time with no action, Albee keeps us absorbed in the conversation through his customary control of language. Although Nancy and Charlie speak of emptiness and inactivity, Albee's sense of verbal nuance, his ear for actual speech patterns, and his ability to heighten and intensify naturalistic speech endow the conversation with a wonderful energy. Moreover, we are drawn by the characters' situation (perhaps plight), the basic seriousness of their concerns, and the charming mixture of lightness and wit as a leaven to the sober communication.

The direct consideration of Nancy's beachcombing suggestion leads the couple to consider the meaning of life and the imminence of death. Nancy responds to Charlie's desire to rest by asking:

But is this what we've … come all this way for? (Some wonder and chiding) Had the children? Spent all this time together? All the sharing? For nothing? To lie back down in the crib again? The same at the end as at the beginning? Sleep? Pacifier? Milk? Incomprehensible once more?

(p. 9)24

This statement, coupled with Nancy's fervor in considering old age, retirement farms, and whether they will die together or alone, causes Charlie to agree smilingly to Nancy's proposition of a life of endless beachcombing; he does so principally in an effort to pacify Nancy and to rest. Just as they reach a state of relaxation, the jet plane again roars overhead. Almost ritually, Nancy repeats her initial line, which came after the plane first disturbed them: "Such noise they make!" (pp. 3, 13). The repetition is deceptive; the plane's droning actually serves as a kind of coda, leading the couple to a new area of discussion. Such a change might in fact happen quite naturally in any conversation after such a disturbance, and the purity and cleanness of the transition maintains the ritualistic quality that lies just beneath the naturalistic surface of Albee's play.

Although this new period of discussion concerns numerous subtopics, it focuses primarily upon Charlie's boyhood practice of diving underwater and staying submerged for long periods of time. Ever since Charlie was a little child, he wished to live under the sea, and so he often would let out all the air from his lungs, sink as far down as he could, and remain there as long as possible. He loved to watch the fish and see the variegated colors of the underwater world, and presumably he felt a sense of oneness with the sea, the place from which all living creatures originally came.

In contrast to Charlie's impulse toward sea life, Nancy reveals that she wanted to be only two things when she was young: a pony and a woman. As they banter about her having achieved her second aim, they move associatively—the play's method—to the marvel of having built a family ("a reversed pyramid, always in danger of toppling over when people don't behave themselves"—p. 15). The challenge, excitement, and wonder of having built a family and the continuity of life are matters to which the couple thrill in discussion. Albee indicates a true reverence for the beauty of togetherness and closeness, which the word family implies. There is truth and tenderness between this couple; there is also love. Albee reveals himself in this discussion and throughout the play as a man of much wisdom, warmth, and insight into life.

Again, Charlie returns to a description of his submergence——this time at a protected cove at a summer place when he was a teenager. He tells how he would enter naked and remain under for a very long time, becoming "part of the undulation and the silence" (p. 17). He remembers that it "was very good" (p. 17). Appreciating the richness of Charlie's experience, with its associations of youth, courage, sensuality, and deep communion with nature, Nancy, who from the play's start has been trying to reactivate Charlie's life impulses, encourages him to strip and submerge himself once more. When he hesitates, she encourages him by countering all of his objections, including the possibility that some other beachcombers would observe him. Nancy wants him to relive the experience both for himself and for her own vicarious excitement. Since this experience has many sexual associations and ramifications, her encouragement leads them to a discussion of sex and the loss of potency. Associatively again, they go on to discuss marital fidelity and sexual fantasy.

Nancy tells of how, during a period when Charlie was melancholic, she had thought of divorcing him. She had been a modest girl before her marriage, but by marrying and staying with only one man, she feels that she deprived herself of much sexual experience. She reveals that she has dreamed of former boyfriends with whom she missed her chance for sexual involvement. She has thought of liberation and of regaining her youth by starting again. Such thinking, she contends (presumably, Albee agrees), is the cause of many divorces. Nancy's own wavering came when she was thirty; she recalls an instance when she was quite pretty, pink, and literate; propped up beside Charlie in bed, she stared at the moles on his back while he, in a state of melancholia, lay there unresponsive and uninterested in her.

At that time, Nancy had wondered if Charlie had found another woman; knowing how various are the springs of attachment, she would not have really blamed him if he had had such a relationship. Her mother, she reveals, had said that if Charlie did leave and had then returned to her, he would have done so at a price, the price being some loss of spiritual fidelity. Her mother suggested that that would bring Nancy "halfway to compassion" (p. 24). When Charlie asks what would then establish full compassion, Nancy answers that the other half of the journey to compassion would have had to do with sensing his loneliness and male need for liberation. In any case, she divested herself of the divorce notion within a week.

While Charlie agrees with her that fantasy can play a significant part in sexual relations, he contends that he has been faithful to Nancy, both in mind and in spirit. They now feel quite close, and Nancy again encourages him to find his cove, to submerge, even to take her along if he wishes. She looks about and says that the other sunbathers have gone; he would not be observed. This renewed exhortation by Nancy is motivated by her sense that so much in life is fleeting, "so much goes" (p. 25). She mentions her eyesight specifically, and yet implies the more intangible commodities of youth and opportunity.

Then Nancy thinks she sees people farther up on the dunes. Since she cannot see them clearly, Charlie jests that she would be of little use if they went underwater together. She comments that she would depend on Charlie's protection; this notion causes them to compliment each other on the sharing they have enjoyed as lovers and as married people. Charlie, for example, had courted her as she wished, been a good husband, and provided a "sturdy shoulder and a comfortable life" (p. 30). This sense of having wrapped life up neatly makes Nancy bridle, and she petulantly insults Charlie, saying: "We'll wrap you in the flag when you're gone, and do taps" (p. 30). This remark hurts Charlie, and he says that he wants to go home.

A recollection of a past incident, however, diverts them. Nancy recalls the time that Charlie was stung by a bee and ordered her to make mud. She recalls how, after years of working from recipes, she could not figure out the recipe for mud. She explains that her petulance comes upon her like a bee sting, calling it involuntary behavior that momentarily closes off her impulse to kindness. Charlie accepts this explanation, and she goes on to state that what most often causes her petulance is his speaking as if their lives were over.

Charlie agrees with Nancy that all they really have is "ourselves and some time" (p. 37), and once more they express their opposed attitudes: Charlie wants to rest and Nancy wants to find excitement. Charlie contends that one must face reality, the reality of death. Nancy opts for not giving up, for seeking and scaling the "glaciers and the crags" (p. 38). Slowly the debate plays itself out and they speak of returning to the business of the day—writing postcards and gathering seashells.

At this moment the act (and the play) makes its most dramatic and sensational shift. As Charlie and Nancy speak, two huge sea lizards, Leslie and Sarah, come up on the dune and squat down on their tails. Rarely in any dramatic experience, American or foreign, has fantasy been so strikingly imposed on a naturalistic environment. Actually, the imposition is merited; the couple has just been speaking of reality and illusion, and the notion that life is dull and unexciting has been a major theme throughout. The appearance of Leslie and Sarah ends whatever it is that is dull.

To the appearance of these sea monsters, Charlie and Nancy have different reactions. Charlie is petrified, and demands (reminiscent of the bee-mud incident) that Nancy find a stick so that he can fight them. By contrast, Nancy, although somewhat frightened, is fascinated by the monsters. She brings a small twig to Charlie, while Leslie lifts a huge branch; the implied sexual play, particularly the contrast of male potency, is quite funny. Believing that they are both going to die after Charlie is defeated in battle by Leslie, Charlie and Nancy hastily declare their love for each other.

At that moment, the airplane roars overhead for the third time in the act, and Leslie and Sarah become frightened and run away. Symbolically, the flight of the sea creatures serves to remind us how frighteningly far our modern technology has taken us from nature. For Nancy and Charlie, of course, the flight is hardly symbolic.

Nancy is awestruck by the entire happening. Although she has been frightened by the lizards, her sense of wonder and her exhilaration are greater and more compelling than her fear. In contrast, Charlie is relieved at the disappearance of the lizards and theorizes that their appearance was only a dream; he further conjectures that he and Nancy are dead, that they have succumbed to food poisoning from eating spoiled liver paste. Nancy answers:

We may be dead already, Charlie, but I think we're going to die again. Here they come!

(p. 51)

With the reappearance of the monsters, both Nancy and Charlie are truly frightened. Upon Nancy's suggestion, they both assume postures of animal submission and take on fixed smiles. Thus ends Act I.

In this first act, which is largely conversational, a middle- aged couple moves from a discussion of humdrum ways to escape loneliness, dullness, and emptiness to a confrontation with sea lizards, a wonderful, frightening fantasy.

Act II begins where Act I ended, as though the play were one long, uninterrupted act. The act division is useful, however, for the opening of the second act provides almost as great a surprise as did the appearance of the monsters: the monsters talk! At least for the moment, we have entered a world of pure fantasy.

However, the sense of absolute fantasy lasts only a short time. That the fantastic creatures are capable of speech makes them less fearsome and more humanoid. Always aware at some level that the creatures are make-believe, we nevertheless become involved, in fact deeply involved, in the interaction between the two couples and in what is being discussed. During this act, in the midst of a consideration of differences and concomitant bigotry, Leslie, the male lizard, says:

Being different is … interesting; there's nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme … well, then, reality tends to fade away.

(p. 98)

Leslie's assertion is generally true. However, Albee has managed to maintain a keen sense of reality in us, despite the extreme differences between the lizards and the people, and between the world as depicted and the world of our quotidian existence. This is truly a remarkable achievement, not just a trick. The great chain of being (the human's direct link with the animal world) is a theme of the play, and Albee's powers of characterization, particularly his psycho-logical insight and his great gifts of language, have enabled him to make a compelling portrayal of the monsters as early links in the chain. Through this linkage, Albee manages to bridge the gap between reality and unreality and to make our experience of each a means for a richer appreciation of the other.

More simply, just as Act I was essentially a dialogue between the two people, so Act II is a discussion between the two couples. As would be natural in a conversation, the pattern of couple-to-couple confrontation varies; each individual speaks to each other individual, and the partners some-times address each other as a unit. The second act, like the first, is an extended conversation, interrupted periodically with a few instances of physical action.

The second act actually begins with an example of such action. Charlie and Nancy are still lying on their backs with feet in the air, the postures of submission they assumed at the end of Act I. Thus a comic bridge is extended from the first to the second act. After Leslie examines the humans, the couples speak apart. The lizards wonder what the humans are doing, and the humans then try to decide what to do in the face of this awful danger. On Nancy's urging, they decide to stay still and smile.

During this examination period we discover what is to be the keynote of the entire act. Leslie tells Sarah:

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 though they're going to bite. Their hide is funny—feels soft.

(p. 57)

He then declares that they smell "strange." This scrutiny of the humans as a different and strange species continues throughout the act. As this becomes more intense, it deeply affects Nancy and Charlie and, as the examination is applied to the lizards, it affects them as well. In this way, Albee can ask what it means to be human and whether it is worthwhile trying to survive, the questions that link Act II to Act I. The principal mode for this examination, set forth right away, is that of contrast. Two sets of beings from different worlds, or in some measure, two sets of humans from different cultures, meet and compare notes.

After their initial scrutiny, the monsters decide to approach the humans together; Charlie is frightened but Nancy is somewhat fascinated. Comically, Leslie and Sarah argue, like husband and wife, over whether she should approach with him. This speech, with its expression of fear of the un-known and its familiar husband-wife role relations, makes the monsters seem real and tends to link the couples. The lizards speak to the humans and the humans respond, despite Charlie's hesitancy. They all say "hello" and exchange pleasantries.

When both sets of creatures declare that they do not intend to eat the other, the way is paved for more facile and substantial interaction. This specific discussion of intention leads Charlie to comment more generally on the eating habits of humans; he tries to explain, for example, that "we don't eat our own kind" (p. 66), but he is somewhat frustrated in making clear his meaning. This pattern of humans trying to explain rather fundamental things to nonhumans will continue throughout the play and will have the effect of exposing and confronting much of what it means to be human. On the subject of cannibalism, Leslie agrees:

Well, we don't eat our own kind, either. Most of us. Some.

(p. 66).

Such remarks (here and elsewhere) indicate the closeness of the human species to the animal world and subtly imply the unpleasant deviations of some human beings from civilized behavior.

The human explanation moves from eating habits to an attempt to explain handshaking, which brings some funny moments. Nancy and Sarah seem to interact more smoothly than Charlie and Leslie; Charlie is driven nearly mad when he tries to explain to Leslie why humans differentiate between "arms" and "legs" while animals have merely "legs." Despite the conversational tensions, they all ultimately shake hands, and this ritual seems to bring the couples a step closer. We feel that the development of real friendship is possible.

From handshaking, they begin to consider what frightens them; this discussion is motivated by a desire to avoid panic and consequent belligerence if one of them should happen to become frightened. They all agree that they are frightened by the unknown. For example, Charlie answers:

What frightens me? Oh … deep space? Mortality? Nancy … not being with me?

(p. 73)

Then, on a lighter note, the humans try to explain what clothes are and why they wear them; Nancy defines the need as "to keep warm; to look pretty; to be decent" (p. 74). It is the attempt to explain decency (exposing the ridiculous puritanism of humans in the area of sex) that leads to a hilarious exploration—to Charlie's chagrin—of Nancy's breasts. Sarah's definitive analogy of Nancy's breasts to whale mamillaries is both funny and serious; its funny side is the image of size with which Nancy's breasts are being associated. Its serious side is the linkage again of humans with other, supposedly lower, species.

When the couples begin to discuss pregnancy and birth, the apparently minor gap between animals and humans grows wider. While lizards lay eggs, humans do not. While lizards spawn hundreds of eggs at a time—Sarah estimates that she has laid seven thousand eggs—Nancy explains that humans give birth to one or two babies at a time. Sarah reveals that her eggs are carried for only a few weeks, while Nancy tells of the nine-month gestation period. Their subsequent discussion of child rearing also reveals radical differences. While Sarah's children merely float away, Nancy indicates that human children are kept at home for twenty years or so until they can care for themselves.

While this comparison has both its comic and educational facets, it actually leads into a rather serious area, one of vital concern to Albee in this play. In explaining "another reason" why humans keep their children with them, Nancy says "we love them" (p. 86). When the lizards inquire what love means, Nancy responds that it is "one of the emotions" (p. 87), which leads Sarah to ask for a definition of emotions; this definition is one of Charlie and Nancy's most difficult tasks. Although they cannot easily explain the emotions, especially love, it is Albee's notion that the human capacity for love and the range of emotional life are what separate humans from other animals. Later Charlie will make Sarah cry as he asks her to contemplate Leslie's ultimate departure through death. He will then explain that her reaction is an emotional response. It is Albee's notion that lower forms of life possess rudimentary emotional mechanisms, and that animals may not be as distant from us as we would wish to think.

Since this first attempt to explain the emotions fails, how-ever, the couples discuss courtship and sex. This transition to lighter subject matter provides a relief and again empha-sizes the similarity between humans and supposedly lower species. For example, when Sarah describes how males chased her and fought over her when she reached maturity, and when Leslie tells that he was attracted because she smelled good, we immediately recognize an analogy to the sensory components of human attraction and we realize how near we humans are to the world of the animals. This discussion of sex gets particularly funny when Nancy objects to Charlie's thinking Sarah may have had affairs.

Conversely, Charlie's assumption that human standards are inapplicable to the lizards nearly gets him into a fight with Leslie. He says that Leslie "has no grasp of conceptual matters, … hasn't heard of half the words in the English language,… lives on the bottom of the sea and has green scales" (p. 94). In fact, he suggests that Leslie is no more intelligent than a fish. This infuriates Leslie. Just as Charlie feels superior to Leslie, Leslie feels superior to fish; there-fore, we perceive that both Charlie and Leslie are bigoted. But we also learn that Leslie is indeed capable of conceptualizing. It is he, in fact, who makes the observation that "Great difference … produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme … well, then, reality tends to fade away" (p. 98). In these lines, Albee once more lightly deflates human pride and pointedly reminds us of our link with the animal world.

Just at that moment, birds fly overhead and Nancy and Charlie try to explain what birds are. This discussion is inter-twined with Sarah's description of how Leslie checks out conditions to make "sure a way is open for us …" (p. 99), and how he sets the parameters for their behavior. After Nancy says it is similar with humans, the discussion returns to birds, and Sarah likens their flying to the swimming of rays. Photography is also mentioned, but Charlie laughingly dismisses it as a topic, realizing it would be impossible to explain. They also laugh at how crazy everyone would think them were they to try to recount their interaction with the lizards.

This brings us back to Charlie's notion of the first act that they are dead, this time whimsically expressed by Nancy. She also returns to the first-act motif of Charlie's giving up versus her sense of wonder. She explains that Charlie thinks they must be dead because he is a realist and a pragmatist and has rejected all sense of wonder on this earth (wonder being a matter for which Albee has subtly and ambiguously argued by presenting two fantastic beasts as symbols of believable wonder).

Leslie jumps right in on this life-death/reality-illusion question, and both couples are drawn into the ultimately unanswerable question of the reality of existence. When Charlie mentions Descartes' proposition, "I think: therefore I am," the prospect of having to define thinking for Leslie overwhelms him. In fact, everything all at once seems to overwhelm him, and he starts to crumble, saying, "Death is a release, if you've lived all right, and I have" (p. 109). Nancy wins him back to the world of the living by inserting her tongue into his mouth and giving him a long, lovely, French kiss. She explains that Charlie is all right; it is just that he has gone through life and found it a bit overwhelming.

Once again, intensity is interrupted by the roar of a jet plane overhead, the fifth time in the play and the second in Act II. Once more Nancy says, "Such noise they make," and Charlie ritually answers, "They'll crash into the dunes one day" (p. 111). Meanwhile, Leslie and Sarah have again run off in fear. Noticing their fear, Nancy and Charlie seem keenly sympathetic. Perhaps Charlie's recent confrontation with his own vulnerability, brought about by the lizards' questions, makes him especially sensitive to their plight. After the roar dies down, the couples come together once more. Charlie explains that planes are machines and, to Leslie's dismay, reveals that humans even have machines that go underwater.

Such a reference leads Nancy to mention Charlie's boyhood habit of submerging himself. Charlie is reluctant to discuss it and angrily asks the creatures why they came up on earth. Under stress, they reveal that they had lost a sense of belonging, of being comfortable down there. Here Albee is showing how dissatisfaction is a cause of change and development and how thoroughly grounded our human experience is in the life of the sea. Charlie is heartbroken as he considers the transition from simple, beautiful sea life to so-called higher forms of being.

Charlie proceeds to explain that humans also came from the sea and this naturally leads to an explanation of the theory of evolution. Charlie finally tells them that the key point for him was when some creature "poked his head out of the muck" and decided to stay on earth; "he split apart and evolved and became tigers and gazelles and porcupines and Nancy here …" (p. 124). Charlie also points out that some creatures went under and "turned into porpoises and sharks, and manta rays, and whales … and you" (p. 124). Sarah asks if this development, this "progress," is constructive. Charlie is unable to respond, but Nancy assures everyone that it is constructive, "because I couldn't bear to think of it otherwise" (p. 125).

Nancy goes on to explain that she values tools, art, and an awareness of mortality, and the discussion deepens. Charlie points out, rather harshly, that these things "separate us from the brute beast" (p. 126). He explains that the brute beast is "not even aware it's alive, much less that it's going to die" (p. 127). Here Albee is suggesting that this awareness, this crucial element of being a human instead of an animal, is also a source of human pain and perhaps of human accomplishment. With an impulse that is at once jealous, vindictive, and loving, Charlie is struck with a need to make the lizards humanly aware of life, human emotions and death. He says:

… I'm impatient for you. I want you to experience the whole thing! The full sweep! Maybe I envy you … down there, free from it all; down there with the beasts?

(p- 128)

He tries to encourage Sarah toward an awareness of death, but in so doing, he makes her cry and he makes Leslie intensely angry. Sarah wails:

I want to go back; I don't want to stay here anymore. (Wailing) I want to go back] (Trying to break away) I want to go back!

(p. 129)

This is one of the most striking moments of the play, as Albee sets forth the liability of being human, the deep sense of death and isolation that the human condition imposes.

Nancy, who has grown very close to Sarah, tries to comfort her. Charlie is very sorry for having caused her deep sorrow. Wildly angry, Leslie tries to choke Charlie to death for making Sarah cry. When Leslie states that "she's never done anything like that" (p. 130), Albee drives home his point that to have emotion, to cry, to learn about death, is to begin to be human. Nancy and Sarah exhort Leslie to stop choking Charlie, and finally he does, declaring that he and Sarah ought to return to the sea. The beasts resist Nancy's attempts to make them stay and, when Leslie touchingly puts out his paw to "shake hands," Charlie takes it. Nancy, in a final attempt to persuade them to stay, explains that although they may leave, they (i.e., the lower species) will have to come back some day. Then, as the confused lizards hesitate on top of the dune, Nancy and Charlie make the only meaningful effort that creatures can make to each other in the face of the void. They offer to help the lizards in their struggle to exist on this earth. Leslie, after descending a step down the dune and crouching, stands up straight and speaks the final line of the play: "All right. Begin" (p. 135). This is a highly affirmative conclusion to an essentially affirmative play, for Albee is suggesting that it is worthwhile to live upon this earth despite its troubles, its mysteries, and the imminence of death.

In Seascape, Albee has cast a broad, piercing light on the human condition. He has suggested that the human is but a step away from the simpler, lower animals, and that the simpler life—the life of the sea—is in many ways more attractive than life on this earth. The peace and beauty and mindless integration of the individual with nature is not to be found here. However, in the more complex human world, we have developed much that is artistically beautiful and technologically precise; such products have been the fruit of the developed human mind. More importantly, we have developed two principal capacities that distinguish us from animals: the ability to love and the awareness of death. The two capacities are interrelated, for human awareness of mortality draws us closer to our fellow creatures. Love, then, is our only weapon against the void.

Charlie and Nancy are in the process of confronting the void when we first encounter them in Act I. Basically, he wants to give up and rest; she wants to live actively. While we feel that Nancy's inclination is better because it is more in rune with human energy and natural optimism, Albee's purpose is not to tell us how to live. What he does show us, particularly in Act II, is that we are very deeply a part of—and a development from—the lower orders of nature (perhaps not comparatively so low after all). Therefore, we ought not to feel arrogant and emptily proud of our elevated station in the ongoing evolutionary process; rather, our part in the process should make us aware of our link with nature and give us a feeling of belonging to the world. But this feeling is not enough; to be human is to be separate, and this separateness is frightening. To confront this isolation, Albee contends, we have only human love. He demonstrates this by showing the great closeness of Nancy and Charlie in their most difficult moments, and the associated closeness of the humans for the lizards, from whom they do not wish to part at the conclusion.

Despite the heaviness and seriousness of Albee's concern, it is the catholicity of his vision and technique that really distinguishes this play. Albee shows himself open and sensitive to all facets of the human condition: the serious, the funny, the physical, the metaphysical, the actual, and the illusionary. All of his devices deserve commendation: his wit; the purity of his style, so maginificent in its captivation and alteration of normal speech; and his lizard fantasy, through which he reveals the human reality. The lizards are a bold theatrical stroke. Their appearance has dramatic power, and they serve, as does the isolated beach setting, to objectify the human condition and to bring us to a fundamental consideration of that condition; quite clearly, this is Albee's primary purpose.

Seascape is not only a remarkable aesthetic achievement, but it is also a highly affirmative statement on the human condition. Albee, an American writer, seems to have employed the techniques of the European playwrights Pinter and Beckett, and transformed them so that he could make a highly personal statement, one almost antithetical to their own. He seems to be saying that human life is worth living and that it is desirable to climb the evolutionary ladder in order to experience love, art, and the complexities of human interaction. It is desirable even if that means a certain loss of freedom, natural beauty, and the security possessed by the creatures of the sea. Albee has never made so affirmative a statement in his career; it is significant that Seascape should follow All Over, which dealt so heavily with death. With Seascape, Albee has, as if in a Lazarus-like rebirth of mind and spirit, magnificently affirmed life.

Entwining of the Strands

Of the five plays treated in this study, Seascape has the least intense atmosphere and relies the most on dialogue to move its action along. Additionally, despite its crucial surrealistic dimension, it is second only to [Robert Anderson's] Double Solitaire in being the most realistic. Indeed, it is the confrontation of committed realism and outlandish surrealism, a primary Absurdist tool, that accounts for the play's considerable dramatic appeal and theatrical significance.

The play's realism lies in the human characters, whose speech, behavior, ethos, and situation clearly distinguish them as upper middle-class Americans. With their fortune made and their children grown, Charlie and Nancy are alone together on an extended vacation for the first time since they were married. They have come to a secluded beach—during the play they speak of seeing only a few other people farther down the beach—and we encounter them lolling and chatting in the afternoon sun, disturbed periodically by a passing airplane.

Since there is minimal action and much dialogue during most of the first act, the focus is firmly fixed on what Charlie and Nancy say to each other. Again, the conversation is essentially realistic, although the spareness of the dialogue, the couple's naturalistic objectification of life experience, and certain pronounced thematic strains indicate that their seemingly idle conversation is hardly the exercise in pure realism that it seems to be. Yet the overall manner and matter of the couple's conversation is decidedly realistic, and their relationship makes for easy identification. As is natural for a couple who have spent a life together, they talk about their mutual past and their hopes and plans for the future. In fact, much of their conversation during the first act focuses upon what plans, if any, they ought to make for their twilight years. Although Charlie seems to be content just to rest, Nancy wants a life of endless roaming and beachcombing——some excitement and vital involvements to insure and preserve their own vitality.

The couple speaks also of the family they have raised, of the pyramidal structure of that family, and of the children's probable astonishment at Nancy's notion of endless beach-combing. They speak also of Charlie's boyhood habit of enjoying submersion and of the present task of writing postcards even though it is boring. During all this conversation there is the verisimilitude of a familiar mutuality of concerns, believable dissatisfactions, easy camaraderie, interpersonal sensitivity, and serious and comic moments that characterize the behavior of a loving couple after long years of common struggle, common striving, and innumerable experiences deeply shared.

Among the most serious topics discussed by the couple, still ostensibly realistic in their manner, are the matters of aging and death. Both Charlie and Nancy are concerned with the passage of time and both indicate a desire to find tangible proof of the significance of the lives they have led. Clearly life is ongoing, but the determination of their particular imprint and/or raison d'être is frighteningly and amazingly elusive. In effect, their fear of old age and their effort to find an effective means to confront or elude it is the major motif of the first act. The couple finds no effective source of consolation, and the passage-of-time motif recurs like a refrain.

Although the talk of aging and death, with its concomitant objectification of life experience, falls within the realm of realistic dialogue, such discussion (and the fears it indicates and produces) creates tension and introduces strains of hopelessness and vulnerability. Such negativism is given further emphasis by the openness and vastness of the setting, the limitless and consequently frightening sea, surf, and sky. Such an environment serves to engender a cosmic loneliness in Charlie and Nancy, which gives their conversation a particular pungency. Moreover, the peace and quiet of the isolated beach is periodically violated by the roar of a passing airplane, which recurs throughout the play. This interruption not only is intrusive to Charlie and Nancy, but also seems to threaten them, if not all living creatures.

The motif of comfortable, passive escape versus active escape, the discussion of old age and death, the boundless setting, the spareness of the language, and the incursions by the airplane in themselves intensify the action until it reaches the very limits of realistic acceptability; what drives us clearly out of the domain of the purely realistic and into the nightmarish world of the Absurd is the surrealistic appearance, at the the end of Act I, of Leslie and Sarah, two great, green, humanoid sea lizards.

The theatrical shock at Act I's conclusion diminishes some-what in Act II, when we learn that the lizards can communicate to the humans and do not intend harm. As the shock diminishes, the ensuing dialogue deepens our percep tion of realism versus surrealism; the conversation leads us to contemplate and explore the evolution of human life, the differences between human life and animal life, and, ultimately, the value amidst the pain of human life.

The essence of human life is subtly defined for us by Charlie and Nancy as they endeavor to explain various aspects of humanity to Leslie and Sarah. In a well-crafted, often comic series of comparisons and contrasts, Albee reveals both natural differences and ironic similarities between the two "species." Leslie and Sarah are husband and wife, and have a family, a history of biological attraction, a present mutual concern, a sense of pride, and a desire to learn and develop. The only real differences between the couples are in physical appearance; strength; the number of children each possesses; and the extent of technological, intellectual, and emotional development.

While the comparison produces much mirth and emphasizes and argues for a sense of wonder as one of the human being's greatest and most attractive capacities—the monsters become believable to us as well as to Charlie and Nancy—it also holds human life up to serious scrutiny. Furthermore, it produces a diminished sense of significance for Charlie and Nancy, inasmuch as they share so much with a lower species, and an even more trenchant sense that death and nothingness are a facet of both the human condition and the condition of all creatures. As with so many Absurdist plays, we do not know whether to laugh or cry as the amusing yet devastating interactional analysis between the couples proceeds.

Sarah, however, does know how to react; she begins to cry when Charlie explains to her what death is. This explanation and Sarah's raction to it constitute the play's climax, and it then moves swiftly towards its essentially, if ambivalently, affirmative denouement. When Sarah learns that death involves permanent loss of or separation from Leslie, the lizards hastily decide to return to the sea. But the humans (especially Nancy) convince them to stay. Nancy explains that evolution will send their species back anyway and that she and Charlie could, and would like to, help them make the evolutionary transition. Enticed by the logic of Nancy's assertion and the offer of assistance, the monsters decide to stay.

While this conclusion makes Seascape the most positive of all the plays discussed in this study, it is not entirely win-some. Just as Charlie and Nancy have had to confront the ineluctable contingency of their lives and the sense that humans are simply an ingredient in universal flux, so Leslie and Sarah agree, by staying, to enter into a condition that they already know to be dangerous. All four know that life is essentially an experiment that carries a high probability of pain, that ultimately ends in death, and that carries no certainty whatsoever as to the benefits of "progress," the entire evolutionary thrust.

In the first act, Albee leads us to contemplate what the human couple should do with their old age. At the end of that act and the beginning of Act II, he leads us to speculate what the monsters will do to the couple. Soon, however, the theatrical sensationalism of the monsters' appearance passes, and the monsters themselves become a vital ingredient in the dominant questions of the entire play (articulated only partially in Act I): what are the contours and what is the meaning of life itself?

Inasmuch as the couples share a closeness, there is vitalist (i.e., experiential, whether or not logically defensible) affirmation in the play; and the hope for a progressive development in nature is also affirmative. However, neither the camaraderie of the characters nor the possibilities of future development hold any real answers for any of the individuals. They are caught in time with death, and its concomitants of loss and separation, as their dominant individual and communal future prospects. Therefore, while Seascape is not as bleak in tone as the plays of Rabe, Guare, and Bullins, it does share their perception (as does the Absurdist theatre in general) that life requires human beings to face the void. Moreover, Seascape possesses many Absurdist features, including the fusion of comic and tragic elements, a certain circularity of plotline (tangentially Absurdist), and, of course, the dreamlike, intermittently nightmarish atmosphere that is highlighted by the stunning presence of Sarah and Leslie. Except for the monsters' behavior, the Absurdist elements of Seascape are more subtly intertwined than they are in the works of Rabe, Guare, or Bullins. In fact, the distortions inherent in many of Albee's Absurdist elements are recognizable only through objective analysis. Absorption of the monsters into a realistic framework at once enhances the realistic and surrealistic dimensions of the play. In Seascape, the models of realism and Absurdism appear like two hovering presences, essentially distinct yet capable of intertwining, disengaging, and intertwining once more. Seascape lacks a social protest dimension (except, perhaps, for a mild thrust at technology), and is clearly less realistic that Anderson's Double Solitaire, yet more realistic and, paradoxically, more fundamentally Absurdist than the works of Rabe, Guare, and Bullins.

Notes

1Harold Clurman, "Theatre," The Nation, 15 March 1975, p. 314.

2Mel Gussow, "Recalling Evolution of 'Seascape' Play, Albee Sees Tale Not of Lizard, but of Life," Th e New York Times, 21 January 1975, p. 40.

3Gussow, p. 40.

4T. E. Kalem, "Primordial Slime," Time, 10 February 1975, p. 57.

5Jack Kroll, "Leapin' Lizards," Newsweek, 10 February 1975, p. 75.

6Catharine Hughes, "Albee's Seascape," America, 22 February 1975, p. 136.

7Stanley Kauffmann, "Seascape," The New Republic, 22 February 1975, p. 22.

8Walter Kerr, "Albee's Unwritten Part," The New York Times, 2 February 1975, II, p. 5.

9Kalem, p. 57.

10Kroll, p. 75.

11Hughes, pp. 136-137.

12Kerr, p. 5.

13Brendan Gill, "Among the Dunes," The New Yorker, 3 February 1975, p. 75.

14Clive Barnes, "Albee's Seascape Is a Major Event," The New York Times, 27 January 1975, p. 20.

15Henry Hewes, "Albee Surfaces." Saturday Review, 8 March 1975, p. 40.

16Clurman, p. 314.

17"Albee: 'I Write to Unclutter My Mind,'" The New York Times, 26 January 1975, II, pp. 1,7.

18Gussow, p. 40.

19Barnes, p. 20.

20Mewes, p. 40.

21Gill, p. 75.

22Clurman,p. 314.

23"Marginalia: Albee Cited for 'Seascape,'" The New York Times, 25 December 1975, p. 27.

24Edward Albee, Seascape (New York: Atheneum, 1975). All pages cited are from this edition.

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