Albee Surfaces

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SOURCE: "Albee Surfaces," in Saturday Review, Vol. 12, No. 12, 8 March, 1975, p. 40.

["Albee's random speculations delight the mind, " Hewes asserts in the review below, adding that Seascape is "… written with an exquisite concern for the careful use of language. "]

Edward Albee has long been concerned with the ways things come to an end. And most of his plays suggest that the American way of life has had it. In 1971 he presented us with a despair-ridden drama of conversations around the bed of a dying man, called All Over, and it was hard to see where the brilliant pessimist could go from there.

Yet now, some four years later, he has surfaced again with a Broadway play (which he also directed) called Seascape. The title suggests both that the play takes place on a beach and that it deals with escape from or into the sea. Indeed it does. The entire first act is a conversation between Nancy, a middle-aged, affluent wife who urges her retired husband, Charlie, to take up again his childhood hobby of submerging himself in water and sitting there as long as he can. He declines and wants only to rest and do nothing. Nancy warns him that they are in danger of letting their minds go dim and slipping into a canasta-playing retirement, which she wittily labels "that purgatory before purgatory." In despair she asks, "But is this what we've come all this way for? 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?" Samuel Beckett or the Edward Albee of All Over would have nodded a gloomy "Yes." But now Albee seems to be looking at Charlie and Nancy as representatives of an unsatisfactory civilization.

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.

On a more comic level—and Seascape is a comedy—Albee can celebrate the wit and compassion with which this civilization deals with its dissatisfactions. For instance, Nancy tells Charlie that there was a time in their marriage when she felt that he had turned his back on her and she suspected it was another woman—"not prettier, even maybe a little plain, but unencumbered, or lonely, or lost." Charlie denies it, but Nancy reveals that her wise mother had once told her, "If he doesn't do it in the flesh, he'll think about it. One night in the dark if you listen hard enough, you'll hear him think the name of another woman, kiss her, touch her breasts as he has his hand and mouth on you. Then you'll know something about loneliness … you'll be halfway to compassion. …" "The other half?" Charlie asks, and Nancy replies, "Knowing how lonely he is." Charlie escapes from this heavy truth with a humorous confession that once while making love to her he had pretended that it was a previous time with her when it had been particularly good.

And so with wit and insight Albee dallies through the first half of his play, content merely to delineate these two drifting members of a growingly feckless species. Although there is a lack of dramatic urgency, Albee's random speculations delight the mind, for they are written with an exquisite concern for the careful use of language.

There is in this first act, however, an indication from Charlie that they are not up to facing the glaciers and the crags, which may mean that they no longer feel that they can cope with the trauma of vigorous living, or that the next Ice Age will destroy man, leaving the world to a new form of evolution, in which life will again try to emerge from the sea. Actually, of course, this process will take millions of years. But in the theater it can happen with the speed of imagination. Accordingly, the first act ends with the startling appearance of two sea creatures.

Fortunately for the playwright, these two lizard-like animals can speak English. They have ordinary names (Leslie and Sarah) and turn out to be more monogamous by instinct than their human counterparts are by religious and legal contract. Although they lack tools, art, and an awareness of their own mortality, they seem to have a passionate caring for each other that is more sensitive and more considerate than what most humans practice. There is much fun in Charlie and Nancy's trying to explain human customs to the animals, and Sarah and Leslie are particularly baffled to hear that we keep our offspring with us for 18 years. A serious crisis is created when Charlie cruelly makes Sarah aware that some day Leslie will die and leave her to live on without him. This is too much for them, and they decide to return to the sea. Charlie and Nancy tell them that they'll have to come back sooner or later, and they urge the creatures to stay and let them help them adapt to life on land. Leslie challenges them, saying, "All right. Begin."

This ending seems to say that the human race should use its retirement years to teach future civilizations how to acquire its virtues and avoid its mistakes. This positive thrust, and the compassion out of which it arises, allows Seascape to emerge as a benign comedy, without forcing the author into a renunciation of the scathing views he has expressed in his previous plays.

Albee has directed Seascape as if he understood the playwright's intent. Yet his unusual casting of the play has resulted in some slight incongruities. As Nancy, Deborah Kerr brings a proper British attitude to the role of an American housewife. And Barry Nelson's perennial boyishness seems at odds with Charlie's world-weariness. On the other hand, they both are excellent at keeping a comic tone in a play that is in great danger of slipping into a sober realism that its slight plot cannot support. But the outstanding performance is by Frank Langella as Leslie. Mr. Langella is wonderfully amusing in the moments when he expresses, with lizard-like movements, a startled bafflement at the strange human ideas he is hearing. And he is intensely moving when he becomes angry at Charlie's insensitivity. His response—"don't you talk to me about 'brute beast'"——pierces the separation between man and animal.

James Tilton's setting—some large-scale sand dunes——makes the actors seem smaller in contrast, an appropriate thing in comedy. Fred Voelpel's lizard costumes and facial make-up patterns are imaginative and beautiful, and they have just the right accent of absurdity. They enhance a unique comedy—one that gives us more to think about than any other of this season's new plays.

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