living darwinism
by Douglas Messerli
Edward Albee Seascape / Booth Theatre, the production I attended was a matinee
performance on November 6, 2005
A retired married couple, Nancy and
Charlie, are enjoying a seaside beach. She is painting; he, resting on a nearby
blanket. The only interruption of their obvious pleasures is the roaring of a
jet plane.
We soon discover, however, that other less pleasurable issues lie just
below the surface. Nancy enjoys the day so thoroughly that she would like to
“stay [on the beach] forever!” She loves the water, the air, the sand, the
dunes, the beach grass, and the sunshine, and imagines the possibility of
moving from beach to beach, going “around the world and never leav[ing] the
beach…” The more practical Charlie scoffs at the notion. But she persists: it’s
necessary to find out what he really likes and “make all the plans.” But
Charlie, clearly, prefers doing nothing, just vegetating: no planning for
enjoyment is in his view of the short future they may have left.
So Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Seascape begins. It’s a small spat, a typical domestic debate, and
on one level the play never seems to rise above this—the small, domestic issues
of a healthy but slightly aging couple attempting to determine what to do with
their future. Even the sudden appearance of a couple of marvelously colored
lizards curious about these beachside interlopers doesn’t move the play far off
topic: for the lizards not only speak fluent English, but they, too, are a
monogamous couple attempting to determine what the future holds in store.
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Despite some moments of terror, some suggestions of dark horror, and a
great deal of humor as the two “animals” and two “humans” attempt to comprehend
each other’s worlds, the play seems, as The New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley wrote of the production I
recently saw, to “lack emotional gravity,” to be perfectly likeable but also,
in some way, “forgettable”—particularly in the context of Albee’s more highly
emotionally pitched oeuvre. In some
respects, I agree. There is a problem at the heart of this play that relates to
the text’s seeming insistence on a kind of realist fantasy. The lizards who
seem ready to climb out of their watery domain into a Darwinian transformation
seem too glibly linked by their author to their human counterparts; the humans,
in turn, seem too ready to embrace them, to understand their dilemmas and even help them adapt to the brave new world
they are about to enter. The human couple insist that there is no way for the
lizards to return to the sea: “You’ll have to come back…sooner or later. You
don’t have any choice.” And we clearly recognize that the final lines of the
play, the male lizard Leslie’s challenge to their offer of help: “All right.
Begin.” is a hollow one, since the humans cannot even agree on to handle the
issues facing their own lives. Should they act out a kind of desperate series
of adventures to temporarily stave off what is soon to be their fate or should
they, as Charlie’s actions suggest, curl into an eternal nap?
Part of the problem that arises in the
current production is that the wonderfully able actress Frances Sternhagen may
not have the best choice for the role of Nancy. In the original play the role
was performed by Deborah Kerr, and, although I never saw that production I can
imagine the kind of plucky common sense (witnessed in Kerr’s role as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison) and the
slightly romantic and dreamy figure (as she played in The King and I) that might allow the mix of reality and fantasy so
necessary in this work. Sternhagen plays the role, rather, as a kind
Connecticut do-gooder against George Grizzard’s curmudgeonly city-dweller, and
the mix doesn’t allow the play to slip into the metaphoric dimension into which
it seems naturally to want to expand.
Albee is not at all interested in the redemption of two bestial
creatures, but in the possible redemption of a human couple’s life. As Charlie
points out, it would be impossible to recount to anyone their conversation with
two lizards. The lizards are, after all, not “real” but phantasmagorical mirror
images of the couple themselves. Charlie’s own childhood activity of standing
and sitting for long periods at the dark bottom of bodies of water is
paralleled by the former activities of their lizard counterparts. In short, he
has always had the predilection to return to a beast-like state. On the other
hand, Nancy, not unlike the giant birds the lizards recognize in the passing
airplanes, is almost ready to fly away in own extended visions of possibility.
In order to live life to its fullest does one have to chase the future until,
utterly exhausted, one falls into one’s grave? To be an actively living species
does it necessarily mean one has to embrace every possible Darwinian change?
The vision this human couple share, that they indeed are not very
different from the beasts from which their kind sprang, is, perhaps, an obvious
one, even a fairly likeable conclusion (if you’re not a religious
fundamentalist)—but it is not forgettable, or at least to should not be forgettable. For it is that vision that leads us to
these very questions and the solutions necessary for the successful
continuation of our lives. If war between the sexes and between generations is
the subject of many of Albee’s dramas, it is the possibility of peace that he
here proposes. We have to help one another, he implies, to begin living the human potentiality of our lives.
Los Angeles, November 25, 2005
