Tattletale-Grey Comedy

ON BROADWAY

In an acquisitive society, things are the measure of all men. The moral of Edward Albee's latest play, Everything in the Garden, is that hell is possessions. In the rush to acquire status-bearing objects, his characters trample on love, decency and honor and are left in destitution of spirit. Garden is not so much a black as a tattletale-grey comedy. Based on a British play by the late Giles Cooper, Garden sometimes lapses into melodrama and implausibility, but it is Albee's most satisfying dramatic effort since Virginia Woolf.

Money is the monkey on Hero Barry Nelson's back. He plays a middle-aged research chemist who talks in the tone of small boy pique: "Forty-three years old--and I haven't even got a power mower." In nagging antiphony he and his pouter-pigeon wife, Barbara Bel Geddes, sing the have-not-got-enough blues of a deceptively affluent suburbia.

Cutting Capers. Then a fairy gold-mother appears, a working madam (Beatrice Straight) willing to aid a matron in distress with a part-time afternoon job as a $100-an-hour call girl. Barbara is appalled--but not for long. When a packet of almost $5,000 arrives addressed to Nelson, it is clear to the audience, if not to him, that his wife is making good in the oldest business.

Soon, Nelson is shocked to learn the truth about the mystery money. Yet by Act II, he and Barbara are using it to throw a party for neighbors whose style of living they ape and envy. When the madam suddenly appears at the party to announce that the police are on to her, it becomes clear that all of the wives have been cutting capers in her beds. And their husbands are in the know. With baleful urbanity, the men band together and make plans to protect their tax-free sincome.

Symbols & Substance. Since Albee is a playwright of the surreal, the coincidence of the wives' being call girls is not particularly damaging. But the husbands' casual murder of a drunken neighbor who discovers their illicit secret is less acceptable; it seems an excessively melodramatic device for making the point that the corruption of values means death.

Albee might have given Garden more moral impact by exercising more audacity. Suppose the wives had loved their work, and the husbands had quit theirs?

Then the symbol of money would have been enlarged by the substance of mores. The possibility is hinted at in the pointed performances of Nelson and Bel Geddes. As their faces fall apart with their world, the desolating emptiness that is left comes not from a shortage of cash but from a dearth of purpose and joy.

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