The longer a successful dramatist lives, the more he’s sure
to go out of fashion. It seems to be an axiom in a punishing trade that almost
every major playwright writes a small cluster of great plays when young,
destined to become capriciously “unfashionable” over time. The plays are then
rediscovered when it’s too late-too late for the disillusioned dramatist,
anyway. But Edward Albee is an exception, and a rare one.
He’s an unusual example of a dramatist who came back into
fashion during his own lifetime. It happened to Noël Coward during what he
called his Second Coming. The later work of Tennessee Williams, on the other
hand, was lost in the wilderness. At 72, Mr. Albee’s motto could be “No
surrender!” or “Fuck ‘em!”
He’s like a bloodied warrior of theater whose valor in the
face of the enemy-the “enemy” being anyone who expresses even a doubt or two
about his work-is thrilling and admirable. But I’ve wondered before whether
there exists a leading dramatist who’s written such major and minor plays as
Mr. Albee. The man who revolutionized the possibilities of modern American
drama with Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf also
created the self-imploding portrait of his own martyrdom in 1981 with The Man Who Had Three Arms . (It was the
one that was said to have done him in.) His “return” with the 1994 New York
production of Three Tall Women , the
beautiful, elegiac memory play inspired by his icily remote adoptive mother,
reminded people that he was actually alive and kicking (and a great dramatist).
But the celebratory aspects of Albee reborn have proved indiscriminate. Three Tall Women led, among much, to the
recent revival of his sour, soupy 1964 problem play about the abuse of
innocence, Tiny Alice , and an
unhealthy dollop of over-praise for a play that surely remains a sour,
unsolvable problem.
Some of my colleagues are also raving about Mr. Albee’s
latest drama, The Play About the Baby ,
which continues his obsessive themes of lost innocence and memory, and the
self-deluding aspects of comforting illusion versus bruised, tragic reality. As
the vaudevillian character known as Man advises us: “Pay attention to this,
what’s true and what isn’t is a tricky business, no?”
Don’t you believe it.
Don’t be cowed . It’s Mr. Albee’s
convenient self-fulfilling prophesy.
What’s true or false is a tricky
business when he’s conducting it as manipulatively as this. The Play About the Baby was first
produced at the Almeida in London in 1998 where it received, to put it
politely, very mixed reviews. Those who liked it saw it as a refreshingly
amusing-and disturbing-chamber piece about the death of idealized childhood (as
opposed to a tragicomedy of Dante-esque proportions). Those who remained neutral
were simply confused. And those who rejected it felt that Mr. Albee had merely
recycled his past work and even trivialized himself.
As with Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf , an elderly couple in The
Play About the Baby introduces a younger couple into the malevolent ways of
the world. Virginia Woolf famously
has its imaginary baby. The new play-call it a symbolic fable-is about a real
baby who’s stolen from newlyweds named Boy and Girl by two mysterious visitors
named Man and Woman, who persuade them there never was a child in the first
place.
Brutal loss-the loss of a child or childhood self-is a
recurring Albee theme and part of his own biography. He has returned to the
poisoned well, as it were, in The Play
About the Baby, where the message is: Better to re-invent reality than live
with unacceptable truth. “Our reality is determined by our need,” says the Man.
“The greater need rules the game.”
I must say that when I
saw the London production, it induced in me a great need to flee. I belonged to
that morose faction of the audience at the Almeida who couldn’t understand why
everyone else was convulsed with laughter and worse, Deep in Thought. It seemed
to me then-and now, alas-that Mr. Albee had written an allegorical romp dressed
up as a Serious Statement. The vaudevillian form of the piece wasn’t in a new
style, as some claim. Characters bursting into the ironic counterpoint of
music-hall song were first perfected by Dennis Potter in his glorious The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven . Mr. Albee’s Play About the Baby is squarely in the
tried and true tradition of Pirandello and the Theater of the Absurd.
“What! What was that?” exclaims Woman, as the Boy and Girl
run nakedly across the stage. “Did two people just run nakedly across the
stage, giggling? Yes? Well … why not?”
The London production wasn’t helped by the Royal Shakespeare
stalwart, Alan Howard, playing the Man opposite Frances de la Tour’s Woman.
Mr. Howard’s renowned skills do not include an easeful sense
of comedy, and Ms. de la Tour was overcompensating with too much of an acting
storm. Good to report then that the New York production, directed by David
Esbjornson with great care and good humor, is blessed with two superlative
performances from Brian Murray as the Man and Marian Seldes as the Woman. The
two veterans are at the peak of their considerable powers here-a pleasure to
see them holding the stage, and us, in the palm of their hands. What a
difference an actor makes! The comic flair
and experience of Mr. Murray and Ms. Seldes are beyond question. They
turn on a dime and give the piece its glue with innately commanding, lethal
charm.
“I’m not an actress; I
want you to know that right off,” Ms. Seldes’ Woman informs us so amusingly at
the start. “I am a trifle …
theatrical.” To see and hear the elegant, beadily intelligent Ms. Seldes (who,
it’s no secret, can be a trifle
theatrical) reminisce about a probably invented affair long, long ago-”A
painter hanged himself for the love of me”-is to experience one of the great
theater treats. Mr. Murray is our relaxed vaudevillian host. “Hello there!” he
greets us, beaming. Or later: “Oh what a wangled teb we weave!” Beware the
stranger with the smile who might be a jolly bank manager. He goads and needles
in his absent-minded, idle way until it’s time to deliver the executioner’s
song.
Mr. Murray is an actor who in a second can transform
amiability into the killer’s smirk. At the close, the Boy and Girl are pleading
for their innocent lives, begging to live in their unspoilt Eden a little longer.
“Give us some time. Please?”
“Time’s up,” says the Man,
and Mr. Murray makes the moment memorable.
But is the play? Good though David Burtka and Kathleen Early
are as the Boy and Girl, their innocence is contrived. But then, Mr. Albee has
re-created the innocence of youth in the romantic form of some neo–woodland
fantasy where giddy, naked adolescents frolic in an idealized Eden. The
simple-mindedness of his message is signaled by the giant pacifier-or monstrous
tit-of John Arnone’s nursery set. There are one too many random diversions
teasing away the time quite innocuously-about writers, sentimental movies,
pretending to be blind, hard-ons, the con games of evil gypsies who steal money
and children. It is unremarkable for Mr. Albee to keep pointing out to us that
people often cope with reality by avoiding it. But it is the blatancy of his
oft-repeated message that proves glib.
“If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive? If
you have no scar, how do you know who you are …?” And again: “If you
don’t have the wound of a broken heart, how can you know you’re alive?” And one
positively final time: “Wounds, children, wounds. Learn from it. Without
wounds, what are you?”
This mantra of discontent is jaded, not tragic. Mr. Albee is
like the Wicked Witch cursing the innocent young with dire warnings about
growing up. “Listen to me, my lovelies!” the Wicked Witch tells us, raising a
gnarled hand to the heavens. “Better you know it now. Life is horrible. Life
sucks! Mark my wise words. You’ll thank me for them one day.”
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