Albee's Unwritten Part, McNally's Missing Joke
[The review that follows argues that Seascape lacks dynamic intensity.]
It seems to me that the key to Edward Albee's interesting, sun-bleached but taffy-thin Seascape is the part he hasn't written for Barry Nelson. Mr. Nelson, lined, grumpy, a grandfatherly fiftyish, is spending a day on the dunes with his much more animated wife, Deborah Kerr.
Miss Kerr, as blonde as the blinding daylight that washes the stage almost clean of color, has no intention of wasting all she's been through: growing up, marriage, motherhood, worry. "What have we got left?" she'd like to know. And, since Mr. Nelson has so little to say, she answers her own question: "Ourselves—and some time." She wouldn't mind circling the globe exploring every beach that exists: she is the nearly spent life force still in motion.
But Mr. Nelson has gone under, relaxing inert on the sand, willing to offer only the bleakest dismissive phrases as antiphonal response to his wife's monologue ("Let it go," "We'll see"), extending himself just enough to suggest that "we've earned a little rest." "We've earned a little life!" she explodes, chatting on and on about how women really want divorces so that they can be 18 again, cupping her shoulders with her arms till she resembles a tight little Valentine as she prods him to remember sex.
She must even prod him to remember a passion he had as a boy, a curious one. He'd always been fond of sinking to the bottom of a pool or pond or shallow cove, measuring his exhalations to keep him from rising, weighting himself with stones if necessary. Life on the sea-floor has seemed native to him, the abundant flurry about him more hospitable than human society above. But when she urges him to go try it again——now—he can't be persuaded. It's no longer life, of any kind, he's looking for. "All caved in?" she asks him petulantly, acknowledging that her petulance swells inside her like a bee-sting. "All closed down?"
Yes. Then, as the first of the evening's two acts is about to terminate its wholly static relationship, two humanoid lizards in breast shells, Harlequin scales, and avocado ridges to mark their exterior spines, appear from the sea, thrown upward by an inevitable evolutionary advance. Mr. Albee reminds us that he can be a shrewd craftsman here: the lizards appear, seem to threaten, cause consternation before the curtain falls. But they do not speak. It is only when the curtain has gone up again, and we have had time to come to terms with an agreeable fantasy, that the creatures choose to communicate—in English, and in English jargon at that ("Now, listen here, Buddy" may be a bit much from a species in mutation, but on the whole the conceit works: the author has known precisely when to make it unsurprising).
What follows is sometimes amusing, more often elementary. The male lizard, superbly writhed by Frank Langella, is shocked that Miss Kerr should have breasts, like a whale; the comedy of his won't-take-no-for-an-answer curiosity is secured by Mr. Nelson's huffiness over his wife's too-eager "exhibitionism." But once it has been established that both couples copulate, the humor becomes biology-class predictable. Miss Kerr is astounded that Maureen Anderman, reptilian tail cosily coiled, should take pride in having produced 7,000 eggs but should have thereafter cared for none of them. Mr. Langella, wide eyes made wider by the white ovals of paint in which they are embedded, is even more astonished that Miss Kerr should have cared for her unimpressive three and cared for them a good 20 years each. We are perhaps less stunned than they, having listened to our own sixth-grade charges expatiate upon such matters interminably—if without recourse to Mr. Langella's interjected "Wows!"
The conversation advances to matters of "emotion," "separation," consciousness of death, none of which belong to an undersea vocabulary. When Mr. Nelson remarks that death will someday separate their visitors, Miss Anderman cries. The tears enrage Mr. Langella. Emotions are coming into play now, and the lizards do not find them attractive. The question we have known was coming comes: had the advancing species best go back down while there is still time?
It is at this point that the piece wants drama. We've had stillborn talk, kept alive with her customary expertise by Miss Kerr; we've had momentarily engaging surprise; we've played the kindergarten games that Darwin taught us. But there is at last an issue, a crisis, and it seems, as issue and crisis, very much related to Mr. Nelson's earlier urge to surrender. Why is that not now picked up, toward one end or another? Since the very problem so much concerns Mr. Nelson, why does he not engage himself, as devil's advocate, as newly enlightened human being, as something? His very boyhood games seem to make him a likely participant in the struggle—to advance or not to advance—and we wait for connections, for a door to be opened that will disclose what-ever futures humans and lizards choose. But, with the key in his hand and a carefully built-up promise, Mr. Albee will not use it.
If Mr. Langella, turned even greener, senses that "It's rather dangerous up here," Mr. Nelson simply shrugs "Everywhere" and turns away, still counting himself out. It is Miss Kerr, pursuing precisely the same course she has from the beginning, who insists "You'll have to come back sooner or later, you don't have any choice," defending mutation simply because it's taken place. But if she has some effect on their so-tentative guests, neither she nor the new arrivals have any on the man in the case—or on the relation between man and wife—and the encounter comes out lopsided, lopsided and rather bland. We'd been expecting interaction all 'round, especially after what we've been told about Mr. Nelson. But the vital tangle is bypassed, and we must settle for a sometime charm.
James Tilton's dazzlingly lighted dunes beneath a faint swirl of clouds create a stunning stage picture—for once, the audience is honestly agape as it catches its first glimpse of the curving earth—and Mr. Albee has directed his own actors well, though directing Mr. Nelson has mainly, and necessarily, meant nothing more than finding him new recumbent postures. The writing is blessedly spare, free of the convoluted locutions that have sometimes grown like coral over the author's meanings. But he is sparing of more than language; an available dramatic energy is kept lying in wait.
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