Primordial Slime

By * T . E . K .

SEASCAPE

by EDWARD ALBEE

On the U.S. playwright scene, Edward Albee is the emperor who has no clothes. People tend to forget that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* opened on Oct. 13, 1962. That drama is a work of permanence, and the expressions "a Virginia Woolf couple" or a "Virginia Woolf marriage" have drifted into common parlance. In the more than twelve years that have followed, Albee has written seven plays, and all of them put together possess the cumulative magnetic impact of a shelf of dead batteries.

What went wrong? Why are his plays such flaccidly somnolent affairs?

Mainly, Albee has indulged his playwriting defects. Having a very weak gift for plot construction, he took to adapting novels ranging from Carson McCullers' to James Purdy's. One such "adaption," Everything in the Garden (TIME, Dec. 8, 1967), was rather more effective in its original form as written by Britain's Giles Cooper than it was as rewritten by Albee, or so some critics said. After creating the wily priest and the slandering lawyer in Tiny Alice, the play that immediately followed Virginia Woolf, Albee no longer seemed able to invent any characters that possessed dramatic vigor. They all appeared to be suffering from acute spinal inertia and total mental ennui. Finally, he largely abandoned his strong suit, which was a flair for vituperatively explosive dialogue and bitchy humor. Instead, his characters have spoken for years now with intolerably stilted pomposity, as if they had wandered out of an unpublished work by some minor Victorian novelist.

These treacherous defects are all on parade in Seascape. It is not a hateful play; it is bland and innocuous, a two-hour sleeping pill of aimless chatter. In Act I, Nancy (Deborah Kerr) and Charlie (Barry Nelson) discuss their lives, which seem to be a compendium of all the middle-aged plaints one has heard about in recent drama and fiction or, quite possibly, from the next-door neighbor. In Act II, the couple is joined by two English-speaking lizards complete with crocodile tails. The lizards, Leslie (Frank Langella) and Sarah (Maureen Anderson), have been almost ostentatiously monogamous considering the myriads of marine creatures they have slithered against during the eons they have spent together down in the aquatic depths. The foursome exchange amusing and sometimes half-menacing notes on their differing life-styles and the pleasures and perils of evolution. In the end, in a kind of quasi-Marxist manifesto somewhat on the order of "Reptiles of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your tails," Nancy and Charlie entice the lizards into giving the earth a go.

Considering the thudding banalities they are forced to utter, the actors man age a lively display of cocktail-party intelligence. Deborah Kerr is very pukka memsahib, and Barry Nelson displays his boyish charm, though the patina of age has begun to dull it. Frank Langella turns out to be the drollest character onstage with his stubborn macho pride in the size of his tail.

In evolutionary terms, Seascape is a very convincing plug for the amoeba, or perhaps just plain plankton.

* T . E . K .

* In an interview in the Paris Review, Albee credits the title to a distinctly literary graffito inscribed in soap on the mirror of a Greenwich Village bar. He wrote to Leonard Woolf, the husband of the dead novelist, who gave him permission to use it.

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