There
would seem to be no absolute view of Edward Albee's lesser works. There are
some theatre companies who find them worth exploring, some viewers who find
them intriguing and others who just absorb them neutrally. While I admire most
of his—I guess the word by now is “classics”—Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf, The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance and a few more—I have to say, the others
just make me mad. I think they’re phoned in, I think they’re a product of
effete posturing and I think they’re often his railing against things he
himself doesn’t have and can’t achieve, not the least of which is mainstream
popularity and an affinity for tapping into the zeitgeist of universality. (I’m
leaving a lot unsaid, for reasons I’ll get to later.) Which brings us to The
Lady from Dubuque, a play that
flopped on Broadway in 1970 but seems to be enjoying a far more successful
revival—well directed by David Esbjornson and well acted by his
cast—in the hands of the Signature Theatre.
Here’s
the Wikipedia synopsis. I’ve named the current cast in interpolated bold print.
For those who wish to avoid spoilers, skip the italics that follow; skipping
the second paragraph is more important than skipping the first, which is mostly
set-up for the more serious and existential meat of the play.
The
play's first act finds three young couples (Sam + Jo [Michael Hayden & Laila
Robins] hosting
Fred + Carol and Lucinda + Edgar [C.J. Wilson, Tricia Paoluccio, Catherine Curtin, Thomas Jay Ryan]) engaging in party games
like Twenty Questions. Jo's angry bitterness becomes apparent earlier than its
source, which is the terminal disease that tortures her and will soon claim her
life. At the end of the act, after the mounting tension drives the guests to
leave, Sam carries Jo up to bed. Suddenly, a fourth couple appears from the
wings: a glamorous older woman, Elizabeth (Jane Alexander) and her black companion,
Oscar (Peter
Francis James).
She asks the audience, "Are we in time? Is this the place?" and
answers her own questions: "Yes, we are in time. This is the place."
The curtain falls.
In
the previous act, the recurrent theme of the game was "Who are you?"
In Act Two, that question becomes more serious, as Sam, shocked by the
appearance of these strangers in his house, repeatedly demands that Elizabeth
reveal her identity. She eventually insists that she is Jo's mother, come from
Dubuque, Iowa "for her daughter's dying". However, Sam knows Jo's
mother as a small, balding woman with pink hair, who lives in New Jersey and is
estranged from Jo, and Elizabeth is clearly not she. Unfortunately for Sam, who
vigorously protests the veracity of Elizabeth's claims, Jo runs into
Elizabeth's arms and never questions her appearance or identity. Whoever she
and Oscar may—or may not—be, they clearly represent the coming of
Death, something familiar and unknown. At the end of the play, Oscar carries
the dying Jo upstairs one last time. As the devastated Sam demands once more to
learn Elizabeth's true identity, she ends the play with this line: "Why,
I'm the lady from Dubuque. I thought you knew. [to the audience] I thought he
knew."
In
an interview in the Signature Theatre’s free Season Souvenir Book, Albee gives
an in-depth interview that, looked at one way, is a decent print profile of an
iconic theatrical personality; but looked at another way, also spells out the
latticework of elaborate defenses he has set up for himself as a prophylactic
against criticism: that audiences too often settle for middle-brow crap, that
when his stuff isn’t understood it’s because people prefer to have pabulum
spoon fed rather than think for themselves, that if people insist on
interpreting any of his plays a particular way (as opposed to how he might
interpret it, which he doesn’t ever reveal), there’s nothing he can do about
it, and etc. To which my frank and simple response is my favorite Geoffrey
Tennant line from the third season of Slings & Arrows, when he’s debating with Oliver
(the literal ghost director) the latter’s vision for a production of King
Lear: “I understand it. I just don’t like it.” I don’t like the straight-bashing
(there is no such thing as a functional marriage in the Albee-verse, or one
built on a foundation that isn’t corrupt), I don’t like the mean-spirited
verbal taunting of the invading characters, and I don’t like the invading
characters, because they’re moralistic without morals, judgmental without
righteousness and an arbitrary device. (Also a recurrent device for him. He
brought them back in the even meaner The Play About the Baby, though there he defined neither
by ethnicity. And what I wrote about that play serves here as well: “There is a
decided heterophobic subtext to the play’s insistence that married youth exists
to be destroyed…and that wisdom only lies with aged despoilers. In this more enlightened day and age, the play can hardly be construed
as representing the gay community, or even anything other than the author's own
michegoss. But there’s no denying the earmarks of a bitter [and decidedly
quaint] homosexual manifesto that dare not speak its name.” Or perhaps one that
dares you to
name it, without fear of castigation. I hasten to add, I attended that play in
the company of a homosexual colleague, whose denunciation of it, along those
lines, was far harsher than mine.)
I
also, though, cannot deny that many find the Albee-verse fascinating…that for
the most part, in The Lady from Dubuque, the jokes he intends as jokes land, and that
audiences (at least the audience the night I attended) seem riveted. To be
honest, even I was
riveted, in the sense that any expertly presented work of art that pisses you
off that much can’t be dull. And the engagement has been extended. So who am I
to encourage denying you the experience of seeing—and judging—for
yourself on the strength of my opinion? That’s not a responsibility I want.
(It’s also why I hate the term critic, to be honest. It saddles the craft with
negativity in the very branding of it; in truth, I think we’re appraisers, and
the best of us are also analysts. If Albee wants to insist that “critics” don’t
know much, in a literal sense I agree. But the genuine, trained, schooled,
literature-familiar appraisers with a gift for deconstructive insight know a
lot.) And this, I guess, can only be construed as a personal appraisal, and
only barely a review. But it reflects how I feel and what I think honestly, and
it’s the best I can do.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page