Michael Moore recounts his memories of Gore Vidal.

Longtime friends, colleagues and admirers of Gore Vidal gathered in the currently patriotically decorated Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre—where Mr. Vidal’s 1960 play The Best Man is playing through September 9—on Thursday afternoon to pay their respects to the recently departed writer. The mood was serious yet not solemn as many who were likely humbled to be counted among Mr. Vidal’s contemporaries took the stage to recount memories and share anecdotes from their own experiences with the man.

Reading selections from his own eulogy for Mr. Vidal and praising his friend’s great wit, Dick Cavett recounted many of Mr. Vidal’s most celebrated one-liners. His favorite, he told the audience: “Success is not enough. One’s friends must fail.”

“Whenever my friend succeeds, I die a little,” was another Vidal aphorism recalled to much laughter, and, reading a line from a message prepared by David Mamet for the memorial, Liz Smith decreed Mr. Vidal “smart enough to see through the self-interest of everyone except himself.” Yet none of this seemed to remotely deter the hordes of successful friends who seemed to be endlessly seeking his advice.

“In 2003, when I determined that I would run for president, Gore was my first call,” explained Dennis Kucinich. “I said, ‘Gore, I’m going to run for president, and I’d like your advice.’ Ever mindful of the great death of the American political state, he said, instantly, ‘You’ve got to do something about your hair.’”

Laughing good-naturedly along with the audience, Mr. Kucinich reenacted the conversation. “Gore, what, then, do you suggest?” he inquired. “A guillotine,” was Mr. Vidal’s response.

Michael Moore also shared some advice Mr. Vidal gave him over lunch in 2003. His 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine had been nominated for an Oscar, and Mr. Vidal wanted to know what Mr. Moore would say in his speech if he won.

“Finally, I said, ‘Listen, Gore, I think all I’m going to do is thank my agent and my stylist and get the hell out of there,” Mr. Moore said, drawing predictable laughs from the audience at the mention of a stylist. “He said, ‘No, no, you must quote Jefferson. He’s never been quoted at the Oscars."

“I thought he was going to give me a bit Jefferson line,” Mr. Moore continued. “And he begins, and he doesn’t end until four or five minutes later, just reciting one continuous Jefferson quote from memory, and he finished this as if I could remember it. And I just looked at him and said ‘If I do win, will you go up and accept it?’ He seemed to like that idea.”

Susan Sarandon took the stage to pass on “one pearl of parenting wisdom” Mr. Vidal had shared with her shortly after the birth of her first child. “I was struggling to be the best mother, and he told me, ‘Darling, it’s inevitable that you give your children neuroses, just make sure they’re productive ones,’” she recounted.

In her own tribute to Mr. Vidal, Elizabeth Ashley referred to a dictionary, explaining, “As many of you may know, after any conversation with Gore a lot of us have to go to the dictionary.” She read aloud the definition of “heretic,” and then asked the audience, “Remind you of anyone?”

“I didn’t meet Gore until the ’70s,” she told the audience, explaining that Tennessee Williams dragged her to the Carlyle to meet the man. “Now, Tennessee and I were in no condition to even be in public, let alone at the Carlyle,” she informed the crowd, laughing and explaining that when they arrived, Mr. Vidal “jumped to his feet, embraced Tennessee and kissed him full on the mouth, to the somewhat dropped-jaw constellation of patrons at the Carlyle in 1974."

“Tennessee and Gore talked for hours, and I just sat and drank,” Ms. Ashley remembered. “When we finally got in a cab, I said to Tennessee, ‘I just feel so stupid,’ and he said, ‘Oh darling, never mind, he’s just an old smarty-pants.’”

Ms. Ashley reached down to the ground to pull out a shot glass. “So here’s to you, old smarty-pants,” she said, raising the glass to the portrait of Mr. Vidal that adorned the stage. “We’re gonna miss the hell outta you.”

"Oh?" replies Mother, with whom Dr. has shared a bed for 28 years. "King Lear is confusing. ... And people pay attention to King Lear. Or they try to."

"They know they're supposed to," Dr. says.

Well, yes. And people know they're also supposed to pay attention to Edward Albee.

It's a worthwhile endeavor--at 72, Mr. Albee is one of America's leading dramatists, the author of 30-odd plays, three times the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, twice the winner of the Tony Award for best play.

He can be a deft chronicler of modern American mores; he's a masterful creator of dialogue; he has a gleeful obsession with language and words. But he's also an absurdist, and he's capable of leaving an audience more than a little bit confused.

That's what happens in Me, Myself & I, an intriguing but confounding play directed by Emily Mann, the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where it had its debut two years ago.

Mother (Elizabeth Ashley, scattered and wild-haired and wonderfully out of it) has twin 28-year-old sons who she cannot tell apart, each named Otto, though one is OTTO and one is otto. "You don't see the logic of it," she says to the audience, "identical twins, identical names?" The twins' father left soon after they were born, and Mother soon took up with Dr. (the sublime Brian Murray, who has a delicious way with Mr. Albee's intricate wordplay). At the play's start, uppercase Otto, the loud Otto (Zachary Booth, who nicely renders his implausible character compelling), announces that he has decided two things: that he will become Chinese--"the future's in the East, and I want to be in on it," he proclaims--and that his brother no longer exists. This is, needless to say, a cause of concern to the family, not least to lowercase Otto (Preston Sadleir--who really does look just like Mr. Booth--in his Off Broadway debut), who is troubled to hear of his negation.

The play is a meditation on identity, on self, on familial interdependence and co-dependence and independence. Mr. Albee clearly enjoyed crafting it, filling his script with epigrams and echoes and an recurring obsession with idioms.

But while Me, Myself & I occasionally feels inspired, with phrases and dialogue and emotions bumping against each other and layering on top of each other and finally veering off in wild directions, it just as often becomes a impenetrable slog, a series of odd plot developments presenting themselves at a languorous pace.

There's a reason you're supposed to pay attention to Mr. Albee: those words. And Me, Myself & I, thanks to them, and to an excellent cast, is a rewarding evening, even if it's a confusing one. But even so, a surprisingly large minority of the audience at the preview I attended didn't return after intermission. You couldn't entirely fault them: A confused audience, it has been said, is not an attentive one.

editorial@observer.com

The Cake Eaters is a small but rewarding slice of realism that is a nice antidote to the surfeit of slasher movies that have been polluting the ozone lately. Mary Stuart Masterson, a charming actress who has starred in numerous acclaimed films of her own (Fried Green Tomatoes, Benny and Joon), makes her directorial debut with this ensemble drama of small-town life in the Catskills. With its sprawling cast of eccentrics and its revelation of the intimate secrets and internecine tensions of two families coping with separate tragedies—the Kimbroughs and the Kaminskis—it literally smacks of the literary country life created by Horton Foote. I had to read the production notes to realize it all takes place north of New York City and not the rural South. I guess there are offbeat characters in hick towns everywhere.

After three years in the big city trying unsuccessfully to become a rock star, Guy Kimbrough (Jayce Bartok, who also wrote the screenplay) returns a failure, disillusioned and guilty about missing the death and funeral of his mother (Melissa Leo) and facing the unexpected resentment of his younger brother, Beagle (Aaron Stanford, the sensitive actor who made such an indelible impression as Sigourney Weaver’s sexually precocious college-age son in the 2002 film Tadpole), who worshiped their mother and stood by her every day until she died. Now he works at a menial job in the school cafeteria and paints signs. Their father is Easy (Bruce Dern), the town butcher, who couldn’t bear to watch his wife’s deterioration, relegating nursing duties to young Beagle. The thick tensions between these three men are understandably palpable.

Over at the Kaminski house, Georgia (Kristen Stewart) is a lonely teen with a terminal muscular disorder called Friedreich’s Ataxia, determined to lose her virginity to the kind, unselfish Beagle before she dies. Just as Georgia and Beagle are beginning to discover what love really means, Beagle’s anxiety turns to rage when he discovers his father had been cheating on his dying mom for years by carrying on a torrid affair with Georgia’s bawdy grandmother Marg (a perfect role for salty Elizabeth Ashley). To make matters worse, Guy’s old girlfriend (the wonderful Miriam Shor) has dumped him to start a family of her own, and Georgia’s estranged mother, Violet (Talia Balsam), a photographer, scandalizes the local rednecks by living with a black man and taking nude pictures of her crippled daughter to get famous. (She wants to be another Diane Arbus.)

While everybody emotes dramatically all over the place, The Cake Eaters (a title that makes no sense) hopscotches between three interconnected romances—sweet Beagle and twitching, crippled Georgia; Easy and his pistol-packing mama, Marge; and Guy and his old flame, Stephanie. While they come to terms with life, love and death, the film hovers precariously on the edge of five-day-a-week soap opera. The dialogue resonates in a film that is more about what’s not being said. Unlike Beagle, who goes to great lengths to hide what he feels, Georgia is very vocal because she has nothing to lose. It feels good to see a movie that takes its time introducing you to its characters. Ms. Masterson watches them live out the nuances of their daily routines until you feel like you’re not watching a movie, but hanging out with friends. The fine cast is immensely likable and the director’s own experience as an actor pays off. She makes the histrionics feel comfortable. Of course, it’s always fun to watch Elizabeth Ashley chew the flowers off the wallpaper, and Mary Stuart Masterson maintains the healthy balance between honey and vinegar necessary to save The Cake Eaters from turning into As the World Turns.

rreed@observer.com