Beyond Landscape
By Una Chaudhuri
Seascape
By Edward Albee
Booth Theatre, NYC
(closed)
The recent New York production of Edward Albee's
Seascape--which accomplishes the unlikely feat of getting two
talking lizards onto a Broadway stage in a play that is neither a musical
nor a children's entertainment--has been appreciated as an elegant and
urbane entertainment in many reverential reviews, which read it essentially
as a portrait of a marriage. In fact, there is much more in it, which
a comment I overheard during intermission suggests is not being lost
on ordinary spectators: "Doesn't it make you think of this whole Intelligent
Design thing that's going on?"
Seascape is one of three Albee plays
whose titles signal their interest in literary modes and genres. The
earliest was The Zoo Story, which staged the power and limits
of narrative through the unforgettable "Story of Jerry and the Dog."
The most recent was The Play about the Baby, which slyly revealed
the subtle terrorism involved in making lives into plays. Seascape,
written in 1975 and recently revived by Lincoln Center at the Booth
Theatre in a production directed by Mark Lamos, transposes the elements
of drama--including several vintage Albee themes and character-types--into
the representational frame of landscape.
The genre of landscape first enjoyed a rich history
in painting, followed by a second complex life in association with such
practices as the design of parks and gardens, environmental policy,
public architecture, and the spatial representation of national identity.
This reframing of landscape--from (as it were) a small picture to a
big one--is part of the subject of a critical field known as Landscape
Studies, which has emerged and flourished in the years since Albee wrote
his play. Landscape Studies offers a way to respond to the invitation
embedded in Albee's title, and to take his formal interest seriously.
The suffix "scape," while phonically evoking a notion--"escape"--that
Albee's play mines fully, also posits a unifying point of view, a perspective
from which the figures in the landscape are no more interesting and
meaningful than the world they inhabit.
The set design of the current production, by
Michael Yeargan, does justice to the genre of landscape as it is understood
today: a culturally overdetermined transformation of a piece of land
into a set of meanings. The slice of environment in this case is a sun-soaked
beach, rendered here as a vast swath of golden sand stretching across
the stage and rising to almost half its height. Framed by the Booth's
proscenium arch, this deceptively simple set becomes hugely resonant.
First, its cultural meanings are heightened and indexed by the opening
dialogue, where the fantasy of a lifetime of beach-combing, free from
the cares of life and work, features prominently: "Can't we stay here
forever?" To these familiar associations the action of the play adds
a second, more archetypal layer: the beach as no-man's land, social
border and human limit, place of ends and beginnings, and the extreme
verge of life for most animals, whichever side of it they inhabit.
The two animals discovered lounging on this evocative
expanse of earth turn out to be the aforementioned vintage Albee types:
hyper-cultivated WASPS who would never allow their fitful search for
the meaning of life to interfere with the opportunity to deliver a shapely
witticism. Charlie and Nancy are a benign version of old George and
Martha, this time amply supplied with satisfactory progeny (so they
say), and basking in the warmth of their plump retirement funds. Their
conversation reveals a relationship full of affectionate amusement,
with just a touch of discontent smoothed over with rueful toleration.
Played with deep yet ironic humanity by George Grizzard and Frances
Sternhagen, Charlie and Nancy are ideally suited to the role Albee has
in mind for them: explorers of the human verge.
Albee's affinity with Beckett is well-known (and
was recently explored when three Beckett shorts were paired with Albee's
Counting the Ways at The Century Center in New York City).
The setting of Seascape, an expanse of sand, suggests another
echo: the unexplained and unforgettable abode of the loquacious Winnie
in Happy Days. The dialectic of movement and immobility Beckett
explored in that play has undergone a gender-switch in Seascape:
Nancy, with all her talk of travel, adventure and change, is the one
associated with movement, while Charlie yearns for stillness. But the
key resemblance to Beckett remains: the everyday absurd is finely calibrated
with--set within, resonant with, ironized by--the philosophical sublime.
In Albee's case, this sublime has a biological, even evolutionary inflection:
absurdity stirred into, as it were, the primordial soup.
The opening conversation consists of vague planning,
gentle disagreements, and some surprising reminiscing. Details about
Charlie's childhood game of sitting at the bottom of the ocean give
the plot the gentle shove it needs to tip over from its familiar little
world into a very different and strange one. When Charlie and Nancy
are joined by Leslie and Sarah, the English-speaking reptile couple,
Albee's little landscape suddenly becomes a very big picture indeed.
Leslie and Sarah are played with such absolute
assurance and complete embodiment by Frederick Weller and Elizabeth
Marvel, and so brilliantly costumed by Catherine Zuber, that one watches
their every move with a mixture of admiration and alarm, fascination
and fear. The encounter of the human and non-human animals turns out
to be not only hugely entertaining--suspenseful, funny, moving, surprising--but
also one of the most unexpectedly respectful ever imagined by a writer.
As the two couples quiz each other about the nature of their lives,
venturing into intimate topics that produce both amusing biological
information and strong emotional responses, the stage begins to move
back and forth between the "small world" preoccupations of its characters--love
and marriage, offspring and obligation, pride and prejudice--to decidedly
"big picture" considerations that rarely make their way into theater.
More on this in a moment.
Animal references in the theater are often quickly
translated into allegory, either by the playwright or the spectator/critic:
thus Ionesco's rhinoceroses are read as fascists, Shaeffer's horses
as paganism, Ibsen's wild duck as freedom, Chekhov's seagull as art.
In Seascape, the slide into allegory is arrested by being explicitly
acknowledged: when Leslie's comments about other sea creatures begin
to sound familiarly racist, Charlie cries out, incredulously, "You're
a bigot!" The temptation to read the reptile couple as typical members
of another social group, with characteristic chauvinism and intolerance,
is short-circuited, because that thought is immediately portrayed as
superficial and insufficient. Interestingly, Albee performed a similar
evasive maneuver in The Goat, preempting the equation of bestiality
with homosexuality by providing his goat-loving protagonist with an
openly and unproblematically gay son.
So far is Albee from wanting to abandon his animal
characters to a reductively allegorical fate that he had originally
planned to transport the entire play into their world: as he mentioned
in a recent interview, the first draft of Seascape had three
acts, one set underwater! Though later excised, this astonishing idea
has left its mark on the play. For the inter-species encounter it stages
is also a meeting of worlds, landscapes, ontologies. While owning up
to--and brilliantly dramatizing--the seduction of human personalities,
with all their pettiness and weightiness, Seascape also manages
to open a space around them. This space--one might call it an ecological
setting--subtly but profoundly alters the human story, redrawing it
to a scale which reveals unexpected patterns and enjoins a new ethics.
In a special issue of the journal Performance
Research on animals and performance in 2002, guest editor Alan
Read asked the question: "What might it mean to practice, think, and
write theater beyond the human?" Seascape is one answer. Among
its discoveries is the recognition of a new time-span for realistic
drama--one that vastly surpasses the usual limit of two or three human
generations. Though the two couples talk of their childhoods and youths,
their children and their future, the obvious difference between them
bespeaks a much longer time-table. The ethics of this evolutionary schedule
are made explicit in the last few moments, when the human couple promises
to "help" the others to succeed in the next phase of their existence,
on land. The creatures, returning from the verge of retreat, accept
the offer of help. The last line of the play is a single resonant word,
spoken by Leslie: "Begin."
The new beginning is hardly imaginable but remarkably
resonant. Nancy, who had earlier on admitted that she couldn't "resist
slipping into the past tense," and Charlie, who thought longingly of
a watery oblivion, are invited--commanded--to alter their default temporality,
and to regard themselves as implicated in a future no less than they
are defined by their past. That future, it seems, requires them to think
beyond the human, and to offer aid and assistance to lives they have
been accustomed to ignoring. It requires them to move from being mere
figures in a landscape to being the co-creators, with other figures--however
improbable--of a landscape imbued with a new environmental ethics.