Two by Albee: A Personal Yowl

Edward Albee, speaking of his maternal grandmother, said, "I could communicate with her. She was at the end of it and I was at the beginning so both of us were outside the ring." Inside the ring the battle rages--a battle compounded of human agony and bitter hatred, fought until the body is stripped bare, the soul is exposed as barren, and the cry of "help" is left alone to echo among the ruins. In five years, Albee has composed five rounds in this battle--and the Theater Company of Boston, a new repertory group, is presently performing rounds two and three--The Death of Bessie Smith and The Sandbox.

The Sandbox, a short play which Albee wrote in memory of his grandmother, is a burlesque of the death ritual. Mommy and Daddy dump Grandma in a sandbox and await her death while a musician plays a guitar and a muscular young man performs calisthenics behind the sandbox. A sense of futility and emptiness pervades the play. We are made conscious of the play as an art form and the theater as a building: Mommy shouts into the wings at the musician, "You-out there! You can come in now"; and later, after an off-stage rumble puzzles Daddy, Mommy explains to him tearfully that "it was an off-stage rumble." The musician is told by Mommy to "go ahead and do whatever it is you do." He plays, beginning with a mechanical rendition of "Heartaches," an ironic counterpoint to the action on the stage.

The relationship between Mommy and Daddy is cruel and emotionless--only their garish costumes are alive. The cliches they trade are devoid of anything behind the words themselves. Mommy blithely, unfeelingly, says, "Our long night is over. We must put away our tears, take off our mourning ... and face the future. It's our duty." Against these surfaces without substance, this ritual without meaning, stands the vitality of Grandma who, in the end, must accept the help of the vacuous young man, the angel of death.

Of the four productions I have seen of this play (the others were at Harvard, Wellesley and off-Broadway), this is the only that fails. Although the actors are adequate, the direction is incompetent. David Wheeler has his actors striving for a verisimilitude, a too literal reading of the text, which works against the burlesque and the surrealistic elements of the play. The quiet, subdued tone of this interpretation almost negates the theatricality of the play. The satirical intent of much of the dialogue becomes blunted, and the disparity between forms and their content lacks sharp delineation. The effect of the play, which should be clear and total, is only vague and diffuse.

The Death of Bessie Smith, a play of eight scenes in its Boston premiere, has an internal impetus which manages to overcome the lethargic tempo of this production. Bessie Smith, the great Negro blues singer, died in Memphis, Tennessee, because she was not permitted in a white hospital after an automobile crash. This play, in examining the anguished relations among a tyrannical nurse, a liberal intern, and an Uncle Tom orderly in a hospital admissions room, reveals the human sources of this futile death. The death motif is central to all of Albee's plays, and in this one, the physical mutilation offstage (we never see Bessie--her presence is felt through the compelling beauty of her music) is reflected and deepened by the psychological mutilation before us.

The director has cleverly devised a visual image to particularize the main action of the drama. At the beginning of the first hospital scene, the nurse slowly raises a fly-swatter, viciously slams it down on top of her desk, and then grins, as she wipes the swatter against the desk's legs. The verbal re-enactment of this violence becomes the driving force of the play. Each character fights another--and the only response is that which is generated by frustration and hatred.

Near the end comes the cry. The nurse's pain becomes hysteria: "I am sick of everything in this hot, stupid, fly-ridden world. I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I am sick of this desk ... this uniform ... it scratches ... I am tired of the truth ... and I am tired of lying about the truth ... I am tired of my skin ... I WANT OUT!" Jack, Bessie's driver and boy-friend, comes to this hospital, after being turned away from another, asking someone to help Bessie, knowing she is already dead in the car. The intern and the orderly, defying the nurse, go out to confront the all-too-real agony. The play ends with the cries of all combining into one shriek, which soon dies, because it is not heard.

Unfortunately, there is no subtlety or coherence in the acting. Bronia Stefan, as the nurse, plays too broadly. She seems to be Blanche du Bois and Maggie the Cat rolled into one, but by parodying Tennessee Williams (something Williams himself must learn to avoid) she is not playing Edward Albee. Her self-conscious and mannered acting conflicts with the play's style. A characterization, such as Ernest McKinnon's Jack, built by alternating laughing and mumbling, evokes nothing more than the character of a laugher and a mumbler. This effect may be what the actor strived for. If it is, the acting is so false and strained that the audience is jarred. Franklyn Spodak and Herbert Davis fare better as the intern and orderly. The problem the cast had with remembering lines has, hopefully, been solved by now--for until an actor knows where he is physically in the script, he cannot know where he is emotionally in the play.

Albee writes that "every honest work is a personal, private yowl, a statement of one individual's pleasure or pain ... I hope that it transcends the personal and the private, and has something to do with the anguish of us all." If you haven't seen these plays yet, they are worth viewing, even in inferior productions. For Albee's private yowl is rightly and readily translated into a public alarm. By catapulting us with his vision of the world, Albee dares us to change this vision: to feel, and to love, and to care--if we can.