Seascape

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SOURCE: A review of Seascape, in The New Republic, Vol. 172, No. 8,22 February 1975, p. 22.

[In the following assessment, Kauffman dismisses Seascape as "banal" and "a trite anatomy of middle-class marriage and spiritual menopause."]

In 1959 Edward Albee wrote a short one-act play called The Sandbox which takes place on a beach and has four (speaking) characters. It's a fantasy about the sterility of contemporary life and the relative authenticity of an older generation expressed in banality à la Ionesco. Now Albee has written a short two-act play, Seascape, which takes place on a sand dune overlooking an ocean and has four characters. This new play starts realistically, then becomes a fantasy. It, too, is about some sterilities of contemporary life. It, too, is expressed in banalities, but this time there is no reason to think that the diction is satirical.

When the curtain rises, a middle-aged couple, Nancy and Charlie, are sunning themselves. Almost the first line is Nancy's "Can't we stay here forever?" There, one thinks instinctively, is a hope for some banality-satire. But Charlie's reply, instead of being in a consciously banal pattern, takes that first line seriously. "You don't really mean it," he says sagely. Banality rolls in as the very medium of the piece, and we are off on a trite anatomy of middle-class marriage and spiritual menopause.

They are a typically typical couple: have made some money, have loved and liked one another through ups and downs, have loved and disliked their children, etc. One welcome change in Albee: as against his recent plays, he has here eschewed fake mandarinese. This dialogue is undistinguished, but at least it is decorated only with artificial broken sentences, not with artificial flowers. However he has clung to his pseudo-Chekhovian mode: a chief ingredient of this early section is reminiscence, in wistful voice, recalling one's silly but charming past self. Charlie in particular recalls how, as a child, he loved to sit as long as he could on the bottom of lakes and the ocean when he went swimming, worrying his parents but enjoying himself.

Then two human-size, lizard-like creatures, male and female, appear. Their sudden entry into this realistic play is pleasant: I felt that perhaps the long, basically familiar dialogue up to now was intended to lead somewhere. Anyway I found the lizard folk at least as credible as Charlie's knowing the author of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, which Nancy had asked him. (Anatole France.) The lizards speak English, and we soon learn that they live on the ocean bottom. Since it has been very carefully explained—planted, we can now say—that Charlie used to love to sit on the ocean bottom, it becomes apparent that these two creatures are meant to symbolize hidden aspects of Charlie and perhaps Nancy, who has also expressed interest in the ocean floor. (See the importance of water in Freud and Jung.) Presumably, at middle age, various buried elements in the earth couple have surfaced to be reckoned with.

This is hardly a startlingly original idea for a play, but it's not a bad one. The play itself is bad—because it is nothing more than its idea. The conversation before the lizards appear is only remastication of well-chewed play-film-TV cud. The conversation of the foursome is mostly sci-fi cuteness of a slightly refined take-me-to-your-leader kind, two alien societies sniffing at each other. It leads only to some sentimental affinities and some quarrels (meant to alter the tone briefly), with a final imposed determination of the lizards to learn and improve. In short the play never demonstrates in any degree a real necessity to exist. All it demonstrates is that Albee wants to exist, as a playwright. He cooked up an idea—worth maybe a half hour instead of a bloated hour and a half (including intermission)—and then forced some arbitrary trite points into it in order to justify using it. In character, in texture, in theme, Seascape is an echoingly hollow statement of bankruptcy.

I think it's fair to make an inference about Albee's career since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I think that he is caught in a modern trap. He wrote some good plays when he was young; thus by the conventions of our society, he is sentenced to be a playwright for the rest of his life, whether or not he has anything more, really, to write. This wasn't always so: Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Sheridan all wrote some fine plays when they were young; then, for differing reasons, quit to do other things. Nowadays this doesn't seem possible if one has been successful early and then begins to run dry. (And it's not just an American phenomenon; see the work of John Osborne since Inadmissible Evidence.) I have no gifts of prophecy and wouldn't want them if offered; but Albee's work since Virginia Woolf (1962) seems so much more the product of compulsion to be a writer than to write, that there is no reason to hope for improvement. He's still relatively young and could do a lot of other things if he weren't shackled by fear of being thought a burned-out rocket. (For instance, as many of his comments show, he could be a perceptive critic.)

Albee himself directed Seascape with very mixed results. Deborah Kerr plays Nancy as if she were suspended in a noose of arch inflections and expressions. Barry Nelson, one of the last of the standard Broadway leading men—a player with a ready repertoire of "bits"—plays Charlie with modest technical competence. The she-lizard is Maureen Anderman who, completely covered with animal costume and grotesque make-up, still conveys sexuality with her voice and quivering thigh. The he-lizard is Frank Langella, who gives a good stylized performance. (If you saw the recent PBS telecast of the Williamstown production of The Sea Gull, you saw Langella play Trepleff, sensitively.) The lizard costumes by Fred Voelpel are excellent.

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