between you and me
by Douglas Messerli
Edward Albee Me, Myself and I, The Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center,
Princeton University, January 11, 2008 / the performance I saw was a matinee on
January 19, 2008
So has Albee exaggerated the dilemmas of all identical twins, two beings
so alike that, like many twins, they speak a kind of private language
and—employing the lurid fascination of gay (and heterosexual) pornography—even
share some in some sexual delights. These brothers, however, emphatically
declare they are “straight”—or perhaps, to employ the malapropism of OTTO
(“We’re straight as a gate”),
“strait,” very narrow in their perspectives.
Both brothers dislike their mother’s Dr., and OTTO warns him that he
should leave, since their father will soon be home accompanied by six panthers
and a load of emeralds with which he had promised to “bathe” their mother (the
Dr. sardonically suggests the husband may have said “pave”). OTTO also
announces that he is going to become Chinese and that otto is no longer his
brother, that he has a new brother.
Any family might be nonplussed by these
strange pronouncements, but Mother and Dr. are not just any family. Mother is, as the Dr. suggests, utterly demented,
insane as the Dr.—who can only be equally insane to remain in her bed—is there
to help prove it to the audience! The results are some of Albee’s wittiest
dialogue since The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. As the
dueling duo attempt to debate the implications of OTTO’s statements—does his
statement that otto is no longer his brother mean that otto no longer
exists?—an older patron in the row in front of me spoke out, “This is all very
silly—and confusing!” It is both silly and confusing, but also gleefully
intriguing as Albee pushes us to realize that the relation of
twins—particularly this identical pair—is every bit as impossible as the
relationships each of us have with our mirror images—with ourselves.
Indeed, the brother OTTO has discovered is his mirror image, is himself.
Gradually, as he and otto describe their almost enchanted youth, the deep love
they have between them, it becomes apparent that the bad-boy OTTO has been
psychologically forced into his new relationship by his brother’s love for a
woman, Maureen (the Mother’s conversations with the Irish, Chippewa-Indian,
Scottish, French girl are some of the funniest of the play). Even though he
does what any healthy identical twin might do, beds Maureen pretending to be
his brother, OTTO clearly feels in this new relationship that he has lost
himself to the intruder. He has found himself again, accordingly, as a new man,
as a Chinese man whose brother is the man in the mirror, Otto (an italicized self).
When all in this dysfunctional family seem doomed in their attempts to
love, the father miraculously does return in a coach led by six blank panthers
followed by a cart of glowing emeralds—brilliantly portrayed in emblematic form
as “The Happy Ending”—Mother excoriates her husband for having abandoned her.
To everyone’s amazement, without saying a word, the former Father returns to
his coach and speeds off. The family is left again in complete abandonment to
their “strait” self-loves and loathing. Yet as the two twins, OTTO and otto,
hug goodbye—perceiving there is still something
left of their intense former relationship—we realize that they are better off
on their own than as beings entrapped in each other’s identity, that they will
stumble along in the gap just as we all do, forward or backward, loudly or
softly, for better or worse.
New York, January 20, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).