[The critic praises nearly every aspect of Seascape in the following review, especially its blending of the comic and the serious.]

Hats off, and up in the air! A major dramatic event.

Edward Albee's play Seascape, which opened at the Shu-bert Theater last night, is fundamentally a play about life and resolution. It is that currently rare thing, a comedy rather than a farce, and it is a curiously compelling exploration into the basic tenets of life. It is asking in a light-hearted but heavy-minded fashion whether life is worth living. It decides that there is no alternative.

As Mr. Albee has matured as a playwright, his work has become leaner, sparer and simpler. He depends on strong theatrical strokes to attract the attention of the audience, but the tone of the writing is always thoughtful, even careful, even philosophic. As with any major artist he has his own distinct profile—an Albee play is recognizably an Albee play—but if he could usefully be linked with any of his contemporaries, they would be Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.

The story is simplicity itself. A middle-aged couple, with children departed and obviously of independent means, find themselves on a beach. They discuss, in the desultory fashion of old and friendly lovers, love, marriage and life. She paints, he snoozes. What has it all added up to? Eventually they are met by another middle-aged couple. The second couple happens to be lizards.

The lizards are deep-sea creatures at a very advanced stage of evolution who have decided to come up into the air. It is very nearly a foolish trick on the playwright's part. After all, anthropomorphic monsters from the nether depths, who wear scales but talk English in a stilted accent, should by all the rules of the game be childish. But plays have a happy way of not having rules.

What Mr. Albee has given us here is a play of great density, with many interesting emotional and intellectual reverberations. The trigger of the play's action is obvious enough—it is the old visitor from Mars examining human institutions and practices and comparing them with his own to the amusement and the amazement of the audience.

But the resonances go much deeper than could be offered by science-fiction pop-guns. Mr. Albee is suggesting that one of the purposes of an individual human existence is quite simply evolution—that we all play a part in this oddly questionable historic process. So that the purpose of life is life itself—it is a self-fulfilling destiny. We have to come out of the water and get onto the beach, we have to live and we have to die, simply because life is about life.

In a recent interview with Mel Gussow of The New York Times, Mr. Albee revealed that Seascape was a companion piece to his somber masterpiece about death some four years ago, All Over. This is an important fact for the audience to keep in mind. It is an optimistic play, a rose play rather than a black play, as Jean Anouilh would have said, but it is nevertheless serious and provocative. It is also funny, and the humor is all the funnier for having a point to it.

What marks out Mr. Albee as a comic writer is largely his compassion. Even in the bitchy dialogue of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? there ran this deep concern for humanity——even his chilliest wit has a saving grace of warmth to it.

The tone of the beginning of the play irresistibly recalls——surely intentionally?—Beckett's Happy Days. There is the same discursive familiarity, the same apparent aimlessness, which is betrayed only by the occasional pellet of truth or the compellingly apt joke. With the arrival of the sea-creatures there is a sudden danger of triteness. There is a fear that after all we are just going to be told that "everyone is the same under the skin—black, white, yellow or lizard." But the danger passes as Mr. Albee, with that spare laconic language of his, probes deeper and deeper into the subterreanean seascape of our pasts, presents and futures.

This is the first play that Mr. Albee has directed, and he has done so with self-evident skill and ease. The directorial difficulty is obvious enough—to make the sea-creatures both strange enough to cast contrasting light upon our own humanity yet credible enough to speak English, and also to draw the humor out of the similarities between the two couples with subtlety rather than obviousness. This he achieves by virtually choreographing the sea-creatures (he is much helped by the splendid costumes of Fred Voelpel) and giving them a special diction rather than a special language or even a special accent. It works well, as does the handsome sand-duned set by James Tilton.

The actors have been carefully picked, coached and presented. Deborah Kerr (after far too long away from Broadway) starts beautifully and diffidently as a no-nonsense English matron, and then slowly slips off her pretenses and becomes a very warm woman. Barry Nelson (who, like Miss Kerr, and this is not truly a fair criticism, looks a little too young for the role) is a complete master of the off-hand. His accomplishment is so charming and unforced, and he works with Miss Kerr as if they had been married for years.

To my amazement I note from the playbill that this is Frank Langella's Broadway debut—he is among our most distinguished young actors, and Broadway should be ashamed of itself. It would be so easy to play a lizard as a sort of Demon King or Godzilla, but Mr. Langella plays him precisely as one of those animals you have always longed to communicate with but never had the language. His partner, Maureen Anderman, is also superbly lizard-like, but as humanly feminine as Mr. Langella is humanly masculine. A distinguished quartet both with and without scales.

See Seascape and you will get a good few hearty giggles, but also, if you listen attentively, a good few insights about the primeval ooze from which we all came, and the blind, inarticulative courage that keeps us all going.