Edward Albee: The Poet of Loss [Reprint 2010 ed.] 9783110803075, 9789027977649

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Edward Albee: The Poet of Loss

Studies in American Literature Volume XXXII

Edward A lbee: The Poet of Loss

Anita Maria Stenz

Mouton Publishers The Hague · Paris · New York

ISBN 90-279-7764-X © Copyright 1978 Mouton Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers Printed in Germany

For Nienke Begemann and Guy Chapman

"All poets and heroes are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep." Henry David Thoreau, Waiden "Those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love, should enter, if only now and again, into their reward." Albert Camus, The Plague "We do not have to live unless we wish to; the greatest sin in living is doing it badly ... stupidly, or as if you were not alive." Edward Albee, Listening

Ackno wledge ments

I am deeply indebted to Professor B. Hunningher, former Director of the Instituut voor Dramatische Kunst at the University of Amsterdam, who encouraged and guided me in the undertaking of this project. I am sincerely grateful to Professor J. Swart, Head of the Engels Seminarium at the University of Amsterdam, who read my manuscript and made helpful suggestions for its improvement. I am very thankful to Hella van Welij who with patience and care helped me to prepare the manuscript. I would also like to extend my appreciation to the staff of the New York Public Library, in particular of the Performing Arts Research Center at Lincoln Center, for their cooperation and assistance.

Contents

Acknowledgements

IX

Introduction

1

The Zoo Story

5

The Death of Bessie Smith

14

The American Dream

25

The Sandbox

34

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

38

Tiny Alice

57

A Delicate Balance

71

Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung . . . . 88 All Over

106

Seascape

123

Final Remarks

129

Bibliography

133

Introduction

Recently C.W .E. Bigsby observed that, "Few playwrights can have been so frequently and mischievously misunderstood, misrepresented, overpraised, denigrated and precipitately dismissed as Edward Albee".1 Because of the misunderstanding and misrepresentation evident in the criticism of the work of Albee,2 there is a need to re-examine his aims, especially with respect to the motivation and behavior of his characters — not only as they occur in each separate play but as they relate to a body of work which has been developing over a period of almost twenty years. In this interpretive study of the original stage plays by Edward Albee3 I have not compared the author's work with that of other playwrights, nor have I related it to movements in modern drama.4 There are three approaches to Albee's dramaturgy which are particularly distorting: the tendency to try to pigeon-hole the creative efforts of a living artist who may be described as relatively young and still developing as a playwright; the tendency to approach a given play according to previous expectations rather than to accept it on its own terms; and the overall tendency to interpret his work with literal-mindedness. After an intense study of the text5 and an extensive reading of the relevant Albee literature — including reviews and observations about the New York premier productions, as well as statements by the author — I have tried to clarify the meaning of each play in the light of descriptions of the original performance. Edward Albee has had the advantage of working co-operatively for many years with a director whose attitude is that a playwright should have it the way he wants it the first time.6 In fact the author collaborated in the final say about every one of his New York openings and he has directed revivals as well as his most recent projects himself. Attempting to understand Albee's intentions as they emerge in each drama and, much as possible, striving to avoid labeling, I have considered the plays on their own merits and related the themes of the individual works to the oeuvre as a whole.7 I have 1

written about the plays in such a way as to be useful to directors and actors in the initial talks about characterization and meaning which precede the problems of production and performance. I hope these discussions will also be helpful to the non-professional playgoer and reader-of-plays who would like to come a little closer to what the most important contemporary American playwright has to say. From the beginning of his career Albee has been called a defeatist and a pessimist. He is not sentimental, surely, but neither is he a nihilist. On the contrary, he is a stern moralist who believes that there are right values and wrong values. Deliberately, his purpose is to shock, to offend and to disturb. Yet he too uses the technique of kindness and cruelty which so many of his characters apply to their particular situations in his plays. As a spokesman for the ambiguity and mystery in human experience, Albee leaves many questions unanswered but there is no question of unequivocal hopelessness in his work. A pattern of confrontation and violence precedes an awakening from a death-in-life situation in his characters. At the end of his plays there is at least one person who is a little wiser. After undergoing the dramatic events a spectator should be shaken into a state of heightened awareness and insight as well. Since Albee subtly develops the exposition of his plays right to the end, one is in fact required to listen very hard and to reconstruct for himself the background of the characters and their conflicts. Even though it may be painful, the playgoer is expected to participate fully in the theatrical experience, to concentrate critically upon each scene and, at the same time, to respond directly with his emotions. Wittingly, the author makes enormous demands on his audience. Edward Albee has described his work as stylized naturalism.8 While most of his characters are highly individualized and psychologically motivated, they also function symbolically. The stylization is reinforced by the author's use of extreme situations, heightened language, long operatic monologues, and the conscious visual effect of the staging. From play to play the degree of realism varies. Since Albee keeps adapting his form to suit his content, no two works resemble each other very much externally. However, there are unmistakable internal similarities: the musicality of the structure; the ritual quality of much of the action; and the sharp ironic humor. These points I have not discussed — except in passing — but they are important devices in the plays which keep an audience at a critical remove from the action. I have been particularly

interested in examining another technique that the author uses to keep his audience at a distance. For the most part he has no clearcut villains and heroes in his plays. It follows that one of the chief causes for misunderstanding and distortion of his overall intention is the fact that it is disturbing for a spectator not to be able to pick a real winner or loser. With compassion and sympathetic insight Albee depicts a group of men and women who are unenviable people. To find oneself identifying with almost any one of them is embarrassing. Thus, it is much easier to accuse them of being unrecognizable human beings than it is to empathize with them. Yet Albee has frequently stated he has no desire to reinforce human complacency. "I've always thought that it was one of the responsibilities of playwrights to show people how they are and what their time is like in the hope that perhaps they'll change it."9 Repeatedly in the Albee literature one encounters a readiness, almost a determination on the part of critics and scholars to interpret the author's women as evil forces. With apparent relish and a sense of self-righteousness, so many have decided that Albee is a woman hater before objectively considering each female character as she is presented in the context of a particular play. As a matter of fact, Albee is as painstakingly critical of the males in his plays as he is of the females. Half of the human population, after all, is composed of women and half of the marriage partners are men. Edward Albee is concerned about the nature of the bond between husband and wife and he explores the potentially destructive forces which can operate on all the members of a family, whether male or female. His main areas of inquiry are failures in human relationships in whatever combination they occur. In spite of his grim warning finger, however, Albee chooses the path of sympathy. Too much criticism has been devoted to discussions about the significance of the allusions and symbols with which his work abounds. Consistently, almost stubbornly, the author's intense preoccupation with the ways people waste their lives has been overlooked. Albee focuses on the twisted human relationships which can evolve within the establishment, on the results of materialism and parasitism, and on the deceptive nature of ambition. He points out the evils brought about by the misuse and misunderstanding of modern institutions. Characteristically, he brings into relief the problems of mature men and women. Since there are few human connections of any real depth and complexity outside a family situation, the author frequently uses marriage to demonstrate the emotional

insufficiency of the individual as well as to indicate the destructive pressures which distort his response to life. Albee has said that his plays should not have had to be written. "If you don't like what you see, change it."10

Notes 1. "Introduction," Edward Albee: Twentieth Century Views, ed. Maynard Mack (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 1. 2. Edward Albee was born on March 12,1928 in Washington, D.C. Adopted at the age of two weeks by Reed Albee (owner of the chain of Keith-Albee vaudeville theaters) and his second wife, Frances, Albee grew up in Larchmont, New York. He attended Lawrenceville School, Valley Forge Military Academy and Choate, and he matriculated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut for roughly a year and a half. After a decade of living in Greenwich Village and doing a variety of odd jobs, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday Albee wrote The Zoo Story and began his career as playwright. He is a bachelor. 3. Although thematically relevant and certainly interesting in their own right, I have not included discussions of Albee's adaptations, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Malcolm and Everything in the Garden because of their essentially experimental nature. 4. Edward Albee's indebtedness to his European and American heritage - historical, philosophical and dramaturgical - has been discussed in several monographs. See the work of Gilbert Debusscher, C.W.E. Bigsby, Michael E. Rutenberg, and Anne Paolucci. 5. In this study page references to editions in the case of quotations from Albee's plays have been omitted. Systematically applied, they are a nuisance to the reader. For those who actually have the play in hand, the quotations are not difficult to find. 6. John E. Booth, "Albee and Schneider Observe: 'Something Stirring!' " Theater Arts, March 1961, pp. 78-9. 7. The research for this study was terminated in the Spring of 1975. 8. William Flanagan, "An Interview with Edward Albee," The Paris Review, 10, No. 39 (Fall 1966), 110-12. 9. R.C. Stewart, "John Gielgud and Edward Albee Talk About the Theater," Atlantic Monthly, 215, No. 4 (April 1965), 62. 10. Digby Diehl, "Edward Albee Interviewed," Transatlantic Review," No. 13 (Summer 1963), 72.

The Zoo Story

"I went to the zoo to find out more about the way people exist with animals, and the way animals exist with each other, and with people too. It probably wasn't a fair test, what with everyone separated from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals. But if it's a zoo, that's the way it is."1 In his first play Edward Albee introduces themes which recur in all his work. The two characters, which in conventional society represent extremes in the social spectrum, illustrate the consequences of apathy and human indifference and reveal the self-destructiveness and cruelty implicit in an education for conformity. The Zoo Story takes place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the summer in a secluded corner of Central Park. When it begins, Peter, a middle-aged executive of a small textbook publishing firm, is sitting on his favorite bench complacently reading a book. Jerry, a non-descript stranger in his late thirties, appears, ambles up to him and announces, "MISTER, I'VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!" Having been designated as "the least likely murderer", Peter makes the acquaintance of "the victim of a perfect crime".2 The action of The Zoo Story takes about an hour and consists of a conversation which culminates in an outburst of violence. Jerry, who does most of the talking, prowls restlessly around the stage while Peter, whose gestures and facial expressions are more revealing than his words, remains rooted to his bench. The chief point of dissension about this play is whether or not Jerry's death at the end is a random event. Several critics emphasize the lack of design in his final act.3 However, it is clear that by the time Jerry makes his entrance on the stage he has reached the limit of his capacity for suffering and begun to form a desperate plan. First he makes a mysterious prediction: "You'll read about it in the papers tomor-

row if you don't see it on your TV tonight." A static situation is quickly invested with suspense. Then, intent on keeping the curiosity of his captive audience aroused, Jerry adds ominously, "I'll start walking around in a little while, and eventually I'll sit down. (Recalling) Wait until you see the expression on his face". A sense of impending disaster grows. After the confrontation between the two men, the violence and "the meeting between two separate worlds in the heart of a modern city held together at the point of a switchblade"4, Jerry gasps: "Could I have planned all this? No ... no. I could't have. But I think I did And now you know all about what happened at the zoo. And now you know what you'll see in your TV, and the face I told you about... you remember my face, the face you see right now." After the suicide-murder, Peter rushes howling from the scene. Jerry dies knowing that the real victim will never return to that bench again, to the safety, escape and innocence it represents. Without warning, on a pleasant summer's day the comfortable, self-reflecting world of a man shatters all around him. Because of the explicit criticism of the status quo embodied in Peter — and because the play is resonant with allusions to classical mythology, Biblical locutions (however ironical) and the atmosphere of a heroic quest, it is tempting to romanticize or glorify the character of Jerry. It has been suggested, for example, that he is a man cursed with an infinite capacity for love5 and that he is a Christ figure or a prophet.6 In so far as there is teaching and sacrifice, and the implication of salvation for Peter through awareness, on the symbolic level Jerry may be identified with Christ. It is true that Peter at a certain point does not want to hear anymore, refuses to understand and in effect denies Jerry three times. As Albee has said, however, The Zoo Story is not a deliberate Christian allegory. If Peter could be shaken out of his "half-awake, half-asleep, safe attributes" and "average attitudes" only by participating in Jerry's death, then Jerry has to die.7 On the other hand, on a realistic plane it is equally misleading to read the play as "the revolt of the flamboyant bohemian against a placid bourgeoisie"8 or to label Jerry as "a sensitive beat-nik"9, much less "a hipster-drifter".10 At the end of the 1950's beat-niks briefly formed a sub-culture whose members recognized each other by their black sweaters and jeans, lived in Greenwich Village and somewhat ostentatiously

shared an alternative life-style — and their own special brand of fantasy. Jerry is a bitter, lonely man without illusions. Peter would feel more comfortable if he could "pigeon-hole" the hulking stranger, but Jerry specifically points out that he does not live in the Village. And in the period before turtle-necks and denims became the rage, he is described as "not poorly dressed, but carelessly". However, as Harold Clurman observes, "The play may be considered a brilliant dramatization of certain tragic and crucial factors which contributed to produce the 'beat' generation".11 Again on the realistic level, it is sentimental to describe Jerry as someone whose condition in large measure "grows out of his need for truth"12, or as someone who "cultivated his sensibility and integrity and paid for it with social failure".13 It is mawkish to make Jerry culpable14 because he does not, for example, bring presents to the Puerto Rican children in his rooming house and ingratiate himself with that poor family, or invite the crying woman on the third floor to go to the movies with him. The product of a disastrous marriage and an unhappy childhood, the victim of his parents' vagaries and alcoholism, Jerry is not overburdened with a sense of his own worth. Abandoned by his mother at the age of ten and a half, neglected by his father and orphaned at twelve, he has been completely on his own from the day of his high school graduation. The man's vulnerability and his affinity for the abused, black monster of a dog that attacks him in the entrance hall where he lives hardly seem surprising. Both Jerry and the dog are intrinsically suspicious of the appearance of friendship. It becomes distorted in both their minds and associated with attempted destruction. After he tells Peter "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG", Jerry speaks sadly: "The dog and I have attained a compromise; more of a bargain, really. We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other. And, was trying to feed the dog an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog's attempt to bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" A "permanent transient", "(Jerry's) home is the sickening roominghouses on the West Side of New York City." He makes "money with (his) body", never sees "the little ladies more than once", and his most compelling emotional involvement recently has been with his landlady's

dog. Among his possessions is a strong box without a lock full of "please letters" and "when letters" which he does not answer. Conscious of his isolation and painfully aware of his inability to overcome it, Jerry is depicted as a man incapable of love. His loneliness on this Sunday afternoon takes the form of loquacious desperation. "A person has to have some way of dealing with something", he explains. By the time he meets Peter, he has thought long and deeply about the way people are kept apart by barriers inside themselves as well as outside, barriers as tangible as the bars of the cages that separate the animals in the zoo and the people from the animals. He is not looking for a friend or for a sympathetic listener as much as he is searching for deliverance from his miserable condition — with perhaps the hope of one spark of recognition in the eyes of a fellow human being before he dies. Gilbert Debusscher sums it up. "(Jerry's) death (is) an escape from an unbearable world and a hellish life, a capitulation to the interior contradictions which tear him apart. His last words do not express the jubilation of a victor but the humble thanks of a wounded animal put out of its misery at last."15 If the character of Peter is criticized for being insufficiently threedimensional16, the character of Jerry cannot be considered much less of a stereotype. He is the classic example of the dupe of a cruel fate — the bright kid who never had a chance. For Albee Jerry represents a wasted life. The question which the author is stridently asking in this play is in fact whether the one man is any less depersonalized than the other. For the author the polarization of Jerry and Peter represents man's alienation from himself. Peter is the one who has had all the advantages and who does all the right things. In a society which resolutely ignores reality in its obsession with external show, he has done relatively well for himself: eighteen thousand a year, an Upper East Side address, wife, children, and two TV's. It is precisely because he has surrendered himself to his role that Peter is the target of satire. No longer in a state of becoming, he has entered a state of living death. For the author Peter represents another form of wasted life. Reticent and inarticulate, with an aura of unspecified guilt about him, he betrays the lack of imagination not untypical of a person in a position of some authority. When Jerry asks him, "What's the dividing line between upper-middle-middle-class and lower-upper-middle-class?" the dominant metaphor of the play begins to unfold: "The zoo; the zoo. Something about the zoo". Bewildered, Peter becomes patronizing while

8

Jerry barely disguises his contempt. His questions about Peter's marriage take instinctive aim at the man's area of maximum vulnerability. For someone who replies with a supercilious "Why certainly" to the exclamation "You're married!" and whose arrogant response to the history of Jerry's one-night stands is to recommend a wife, the reason why this man is spending his free time alone reading a book in the park on a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon is fairly obvious, especially since he says, "I sit on this bench almost every Sunday afternoon there's never anyone sitting here, so I have it all to myself. As C.W.E. Bigsby notes in his discussion of Peter, "Solitariness is not an inescapable aspect of the human condition but a strategy whereby the individual attempts to escape the consequences of freedom".17 With a little prodding, Peter as good as admits his disillusionment with marriage, sex, children. After an angry outburst at Jerry's audacious probings into his private life, he says quietly (and loyally), giving voice to a deep disappointment, "We'll have no more children". There is no overt reaction, however (except of relief to be on to another subject), when — apropos of some talk about a pack of pornographic playing cards — Jerry makes the bitterly cynical observation, "It's that when you're a kid, you use the cards as a substitute for the real experience and when you're older you use the real experience as a substitute for the fantasy". Because of the kind of life which Jerry leads, he is anything but sentimental about bodily functions. The popular opinion that "naturally, every man wants a son" has no meaning for him. In the words of Thomas E. Porter, Jerry knows that "the creative urge has no magic in it that can unify the procreators. (That) it is simple biology, mechanistic and impersonal".18 Conventionally the ideas that give external form to society's institutions become defenses against real feelings. Among the things that Peter ultimately is left to sort out for himself is the difference between sexual need and love. Perhaps for the first time in his life he may consciously question the foundations of his marriage. By the end of the play, in an "imbecil(ic) slow-witted" reaction to what Jerry has just tried to tell him about himself, Peter gives voice to his cramped stoicism and says, "It's a rule; people can have some of the things they want, but they can't have everything". Without realizing it he unmasks himself. At first, when Jerry describes his rooming house as a "humiliating excuse for a jail", Peter cannot help being sorry for him. "Why ... why do you live there?" he asks naively. When Jerry catalogues his miserable list

of worldly possessions, Peter stares glumly at his shoes for a while before he wonders out loud about the two empty picture frames. When Jerry tells him about the demise of his short-lived family, he mutters, "Oh, my; oh my". It is at this point that the two men exchange first names. Then, much as he wants Peter to stay and listen, Jerry starts to arouse hostile feelings in him. He tells the story of his encounters with his landlady's aggressive black dog and his attempt to befriend it with offerings of raw hamburger. He describes his relationship with the animal after his unsuccessful attempt to poison it: "We regard each other with a mixture of sadness and suspicion, and then we feign indifference. We walk past each other safely; we have an understanding. We had made many attempts at contact, and we had failed I have gained solitary free passage, if that much further loss can be said to be gain." Here communication blocks. Peter may not "understand" now for Jerry is hitting too close to home. If he admits that he understands — if he acknowledges a shared feeling — they will have made contact and the basis for a friendship will have been laid. But Peter is a man from the East side. He cannot admit that he has something in common with a non-descript stranger. Nevertheless, whatever his protests to the contrary are, Peter knows what Jerry means when he says of himself and the dog, "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other". Jerry knows that Peter knows and that he is smugly caged behind the bars of his selfimage. Peter releases his acute discomfort and pent-up emotion in an outburst of whimsey and hysterical laughter. While he is off-guard, Jerry, who clearly has nothing to deter him from his desperate plan, starts to punch Peter in the arm and push him off the bench. Now the ugliness of the cautious, conservative man really surfaces. Frightened and existentially threatened — no longer polite — Peter exposes the mentality behind his programmed self. "You're a bum", he cries. "You wouldn't know anything about honor I'm a responsible person, and I'm a GROWNUP!" Jerry whips back: "This is probably the first time in your life you've had anything more trying to face than changing your cats' toilet box. Stupid! Don't you have any idea of what other people need?" By this time he has tossed a knife at Peter's feet. He deftly ends his verbal assault: "You pathetic little vegetable You couldn't even get your 10

wife with a male child." Enraged, Peter picks up the weapon and holds it in a gesture of self-defense. For one second Jerry hesitates. Then he impales himself on the knife that Peter holds at the end of his outstretched arm. In response to the accusation that The Zoo Story is nihilistic and pessimistic, Albee has replied that, on the contrary, by dying Jerry passes on an awareness of life to Peter.19 When he challenges him with the cry, "Are these the things men fight for?" Peter does not run away. In his absurd defense of the bench — that piece of wood and iron, for all his complacency ultimately Peter inspires sympathy and even respect, for he dares to define himself through his action. Having drugged himself with a false sense of security and disguised his doubts in appearance for so long, the shock of violence and death at his own hand is necessary to wake him up. Because he is incited to rage and made to feel, the illusory insulation surrounding him falls away. In a state of physical terror, overwhelmed by the realization that he is at the mercy of a desperate man, Peter comprehends life at Jerry's level. He becomes truly conscious of his own mortality and of the basic human need for intense involvement with another. At the moment of their grim intimacy with the knife there is contact between Peter and Jerry. The loneliness of the two men from opposite sides of the city is briefly banished in the acknowledgement of a common anguish. With his dying breath Jerry tells Peter that the plan he had when he saw him sitting there on his bench in the park has been fulfilled: "While I was at the Zoo I decided that I would walk north ... until I found you ... or somebody ... and I decided that I would talk to you ... I would tell you things... and the things I would tell you would ... Well, there we are. You see? Here we are." Peter has confronted Jerry and he will never forget him. He has also looked into his own heart. The man (who reads TIME magazine) will never again be able to say as he does after Jerry's description of his West Side rooming house and its pitiable inhabitants, "It's so unthinkable. I find it hard to believe that people such as that really are".. He will never again presume that "fact is better left for fiction", that human suffering is for reading about or for watching dispassionately on TV. In the future Peter will also think twice before he gives peremptory lip-service to the mythology that a wife and children are necessarily the guarantee against 11

a man's loneliness. When he returns to his "own zoo" on the East Side, he will bring with him a new consciousness of himself, his marriage and of the world around him. Peter has perceived the emptiness of his existence, a life, as Rose Zimbardo observes, "in which cats, children, wife and parakeets are interchangeable because they are all merely props whose function it is to disguise nothingness and isolation".20 The Zoo Story is not a denial of life. At the end of the play the implication is that Peter will no longer be able to continue the death-in-life role he was playing before he met Jerry. He made choices before. He may make other choices in the future based on a new way of seeing. However, whether Peter will find redemption or not is deliberately left uncertain. From the very beginning of his career Albee has made it clear that he has no intention of tying everything up for an audience. He wants them to have something to think about "when they go out of the theater".21 In his discussion of The Zoo Story, Robert S. Wallace astutely observes that the difficulty for the viewer of an Albee play is that there are no real winners and losers.22 As the alienated characters reveal themselves, the audience also becomes estranged. Poised between a sympathetic and a critical attitude, a spectator is forced into a disturbing state of simultaneous involvement and objectivity. The villains of the author's first work emerge in the form of blindness and selfishness. As in all of his following plays, Albee is concerned with the inadequacy of the human heart.

Notes 1. All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York: Signet Books, 1963). 2. The description of the action on the stage is taken from Whitney Bolton's review of the original New York production of The Zoo Story in The Morning Telegraph, 16 Jan. 1960. 3. See Gilbert Debusscher, Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal, trans. Anne D. Williams (Brussels: Center for American Studies, 1969), p. 10, and Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York: Avon Discus Books, 1970), p. 28. 4. Alan Lewis, "The Fun and Games of Edward Albee " American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theater (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1965), p. 83. 5. George Wellwarth, "Hope Deferred: The New American Drama," The Theater of Protest and Paradox (New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 276. 6. Rose Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story," Twentieth Century Literature, 8 No. 1 (April 1962), 15-16.

12

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Rutenberg, "Interview with Edward Albee, March 17,1965," pp. 220-21. Debusscher, loc. cit. Henry Hewes, "Benchmanship," Saturday Review, 6 Feb. 1960, p. 32. Ruby Cohn and Bernard F. Dukore eds., Twentieth Century Drama: England, Ireland, The United States (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 651. The Naked Image (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 14. Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward Albee's Zoo Story," p. 12. Lee BaxandaU, "The Theater of Edward Albee, "Tulane Drama Review, 9, No. 4 (Summer 1965), 26. Mary Nilan, "Albee's Zoo Story: Alienated Man and the Nature of Love," Modern Drama, 16, No. 1 (June 1973), 56. Debusscher, Tradition and Renewal, op. cit., pp. 12-13. Robert Brustein, "Listening to the Past," Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 29. Albee (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 18. Myth and Modern American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1969), p.246. New York Times, 15 Feb. 1960. Zimbardo, op. cit., p. 13. Booth, John E., "Albee and Schneider Observe: 'Something Stirring'," Theater Arts, March 1961, p. 79. "The Zoo Story: Albee's Attack on Fiction," Modem Drama, 16, No. 1 (June 1973), 52-3.

13

The Death of Bessie Smith

"My dissatisfactions have nothing to do with loyalties ... I am not concerned with politics ...but I have a sense of urgency ... a dislike of waste ... stagnation ,.."1 Albee's second one-act play takes place in and around a semi-private, segregated hospital in Memphis, Tennessee in the year 1937. Bessie Smith does not appear on the stage. The author uses the legend about the death of the famous blues singer2 in order to continue his exploration of the effects which rigid social institutions have on the development of the individual. In this case he is particularly concerned with the consequences for everyone involved in a climate of living which fosters racism. The Death of Bessie Smith is composed of eight scenes. The main action takes place in the central and front area of the stage where a Nurse, a negro Orderly and a young Intern gossip and bicker at a Hospital Admissions Desk. Four other playing areas are indicated: the corner of a bar; a screened-in porch; a hotel room; and the admissions desk of another hospital ironically called Mercy. "All of this very open, for the whole back wall is full of the sky, which will vary from scene to scene: a hot blue; a sunset; a great, red-orange-yellow sunset." Against the panorama of the changing heavens, while the three main characters are arguing, the negro Jack, a self-styled impressario, is taking Bessie Smith north to New York for a come-back. As Jerry describes it in The Zoo Story, "New York City ... the greatest city in the world, Amen". After a serious accident on the road, Jack seeks help at Mercy Hospital but he is turned away because only whites are admitted there. The two plots merge when the desperate man confronts the Nurse, the negro Orderly and the young Intern in their segregated hospital with the dead body of a black woman. In The Zoo Story Peter was quite asleep before Jerry shocked him into a confrontation with himself in the eyes of a suffering fellow human being. 14

The characters in The Death of Bessie Smith are all awake to the incongruities of their respective existences. Aware of the separation between a person and his life, filled with the longing for connection and commitment, Jack, Nurse, Orderly and Intern all "want out". However, as Paul Witherington observes, the imagery of this play is built around the desire for movement and change on the one hand, and inertia and stasis on the other.3 The conflict is between each character's longing for growth and self-expression, and the inhibiting influence of inflexible institutional demands. Until the violent death of the blues singer there is no real recognition by any of them of a common need. These people growl and claw at each other like vicious animals and even after the tragedy they remain trapped in their social and psychological, sexual and racial cages. Yet this play is not altogether "a drama of helpless and hopeless lives", as Alan Lewis says.4 Nor is Gilbert Debusscher justified in his opinion that not one character is "capable of extracting meaning from the jazz singer's death. Not one shows even the first dawning consciousness of the absurdity of his life and the tragedy of death".5 Although Jack's dreams of a new beginning for his "fat lady" and for himself are dashed, and the negro Orderly's alienation is complete, although in the end the Nurse is immobilized in a state of hysterical paralysis, the blood of Bessie Smith is not spilled in vain. Shaken free from his inertia by the shock of the woman's cruel death, with a self-asserting gesture the Intern backs away from the Nurse and the Orderly and moves out through the door. Perhaps he will no longer practice medicine in that hospital but it is also unlikely that he will depart for Europe in order to bandage up the victims of the Spanish Civil War. A full-blown southern white girl with a wild laugh, the twenty-six year old Nurse is introduced listening to the blues "too loud" in the house of her by turns irascible and petulant father. Lonely and troubled, consumed with resentment and self-pity, she may not be casually passed off as a female caught in the web of her own frustrations6 or simply dismissed as "the first of Albee's neurotic women".7 To lump her with "the theme of the emasculation of the male by domineering, ruthless woman"8 hardly sheds light on a complicated character who is — not unlike Jerry in The Zoo Story — at the same time over-sane and impotent, torn apart by the conflicting forces that rage within and around her in the American South in the year 1937. As she herself sarcastically puts it, "How could I make trouble ..." 15

The scene between the father and daughter at the beginning of the play, in which the Nurse tries perhaps for the hundredth time to borrow the old man's car so she can drive herself to work and home again after her night shift, is not gratuitous. Her father is a red-neck bigot. The relationship between them demonstrates little warmth or mutual regard: "You going to drive down to the Democratic Club, and sit around with that bunch of loafers? You going to play big politician today? Hunh? You going to go down there with that bunch of bums... light up one of those expensive cigars, which you have no business smoking, which you can't afford, which I cannot afford to put it more accurately ... the same brand His Honor the mayor smokes... you going to sit down there and talk big, about how you and the mayor are like this ... you going to pretend you're something more than you really are, which is nothing but a hanger-on ... a flunky ..." Yet, even though she despises the old man to his face, ridicules his values and resents his social position (and therefore, indirectly her own), at the hospital she quotes him continually. The Nurse is tied to her father, literally because he is sick and lame and she is supporting him, and psychologically because, although she feels that everything is wrong with the way things are, she has never been encouraged to think for herself, to entertain ideas of her own or to take a stand. Whether she likes it or not, the Nurse seeks refuge in the status quo which her father and the mayor represent for, if she were to deny the values of the society in which she was brought up, she would relinquish her identity. She defends the prevailing attitudes around her because she is incapable of taking any initiative on her own behalf. Her situation is not dissimilar to that of the negro Orderly. As Admissions Nurse this young woman records names and data but she has no serious personal concern for the sickness and the suffering around her. She does not take a real interest in her work or make any effort to turn it into a purposeful activity. The Nurse's satisfactions arise not from a comfortable domestic framework or from her job but from her attempts to manipulate the lives of the men she comes in contact with at the hospital. Is it surprising that she behaves with so little generosity of spirit and sense of fair-play in her dealings with her colleagues? She is only capable of the most primitive kind of human interaction, one that is based 16

on a power struggle and leaves no room for love — love that is not doled out as a compensation or used as a weapon. That the language of tenderness and trust is something she does not know is her real poverty. The critics agree that it is difficult to like this woman. Nevertheless, her portrait is not drawn with contempt but with compassion. At the beginning of the first exchange between the Nurse and the Orderly at the Hospital Admissions Desk, there is rapport between them for a moment. The Nurse laughs naturally. Then suddenly she becomes selfconscious and slams the cage door shut, stifling a spontaneous impulse to communicate. Nor does she lose an opportunity to ride the young negro: "Condonel Will you listen to that: condone! My aren't you the educated one? What... what does that word mean, boy? That word condone? Hunh? You do talk some, don't you? You have a great deal to learn. Now it's true that the poor man lying up there with his guts coming out could be a nigger for all the attention he'd get if His Honor should start shouting for something ... he could be on the operating table ... and they'd drop his insides right on the floor and come running if the mayor should want his cigar lit... But that is the way things are." The Nurse cannot admit that she understands what the Orderly means or that in principle she even agrees with him, for she is white and he is black. She is the Admissions Nurse while he is just the "nigger" who "empt(ies) crap pans and wash(es) out the operating theater". She may not share a feeling with him. Yet, at the same time that she thinks he is inferior to her, she feels threatened by him because he questions her father's values. There can be nothing between them either, as people much less as man and woman, because of the color of his skin. The Nurse uses her consciousness of this and hectors the Orderly relentlessly. Because she is a white woman, he is compelled to be deferential to her. Thoroughly conditioned by the dominant society, he half believes he is what she makes him out to be instead of what he feels himself capable of becoming. Since society has defined the nature and extent of their relationship and in fact given approbation to her cruelty, the Nurse feels sure of herself in her confrontation with this man. At the same time that she despises her father and the mayor personally, she echoes the words and attitudes which reflect the authority of the white male community which they represent. She dictates 17

the status quo to the Orderly: "You just shut your ears... and you keep that mouth closed tight, too! All this talk about what you are going to go beyond! You keep walking a real tight line." On the other hand, though there is no racial barrier and it is clear she is physically attracted to him, the nurse feels threatened by the thirtyyear old Intern. She does not understand his liberal ideas. In no way, for example, does he resemble her father. Bewildered by the young doctor's brand of restlessness and discontent, blind to his need for personal growth, she is unable to appreciate him for himself. At the same time that she contemptuously derides the Orderly's ambition to get ahead in the world, she urges the Intern to try to better himself by making contacts with influential people. She tries to chivy him into conforming to the assumptions implicit in the milieu in which she was brought up, assumptions which — whether or not she wholeheartedly subscribes to them — she can at least follow. "What are you going to do about the mayor being here now?" she naggingly queries. In vain the Intern attempts to explain himself to her: "I am stranded ...here ...My talents are not large ...but the emergencies of the emergency ward of this second-rate hospital in this second-rate state ... No!.... it isn't enough." Ignorant of what is going onin Spain or anywhere else — without opinions of her own based on education and experience, and with only her father's view of the world to go on, the Nurse is afraid of the Intern. To arm herself against his advances, both sexual and ideological, she vociferously flaunts her father's values, perhaps less as a means to dominate her persistent suitor than to shield her own feelings of insufficiency and suspicion. Her father makes a sneering allusion to her "boyfriend" and to the late night petting sessions in the Intern's parked car. Touching her sore spot he asks, "Why don't you bring him here and let me have a look at him sometime?" Unable to act creatively within the confines of "the way things are", the Nurse is torn between the reality of her life as represented by her father and his world and her fantasies of how she would like things to be. She does not care enough for the Intern for himself. She does not dare to throw in her lot with him, to act, to try to be an effective member of society rather than an object on a pedestal. The young doctor's passionate need to connect himself to something outside himself, his idealism and struggle for some kind of greater involvement, professional as well as sexual, are lost on the Nurse. She wants a man with status and money. Only thinking of herself, she expects marriage to lift her out of the squalor around her. She 18

is incapable of grasping the Intern's idealistic longing to go off for love and adventure — at home or abroad — with the energy to change the world. The Nurse's ambivalence mystifies her white colleague. At the Hospital Admissions Desk he asks her who she is pretending to be and probes her sore spot more deeply, reminding her that she is not an antebellum lady, that there never were any acres in her family background — much less pillars for the paint to peel from on her front porch. Angrily "flicking a letter slitter"9 the Nurse snaps back, "I am fully aware of what is true and what is not true". This man and woman are thrown together because of their work. They are attracted to each other. Their exchanges are witty and often vital. But as the Intern knows, any discussion of social disparity is beside the point; he is a doctor and she is a nurse. Undoubtedly the fact that "at night the sheets of (his) bed are like a tent, poled center-upward" is confusing everything but he says he loves her and tells her that he wants to marry her. The Nurse, however, is fully aware of her vulnerability. Much as she "play(s) coarse and flip to keep (her) place with the rest", her knowledge of organic processes is not limited to her "collection of anatomical jokes for all occasions". In pre-pill Depression years sexual intercourse is likely to have consequences. With an indigent father to support, the prospect of setting up housekeeping on forty-six dollars a month is not attractive to her. Alas, economic and social realities effect the way people think and feel and act. As Anne Paolucci puts it, for this woman "there is no ideal solution to dream about, no place where things will be better, no escape".10 These two people are doomed to misunderstand each other. The Nurse tells the Intern, "I am tired of being toyed with": "I am tired of your impractical propositions. Must you dwell on what is not going to happen? Must you ask me, constantly, over and over again, the same question to which you are already aware you will get the same answer? Do you get pleasure from it? What unreasonable form of contentment do you derive from persisting in this?" The young doctor remains insistent. To punish her for frustrating his desire, he becomes insolent and then their mutual antagonism breaks into the open. After an outburst of murderous feelings, the powerful emotions which the Nurse has been parceling out in small vitriolic doses — bickering 19

with her father, baiting the Orderly, badgering the Intern -erupt in a howl of human anguish: "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 I am sick of going to bed and I am sick of waking up ... I am tired ... I am tired of the truth ... and I am tired of lying about the truth ... I am tired of my skin ... I WANT OUT!" In spite of herself she nakedly shows her despair to the Orderly. When he makes a gesture of commiseration, however, she cries out, "Keep away from me". At the end of the play when the dead negro singer is brought to the door of the hospital, the three colleagues are deeply shocked by the painful demonstration of the destructiveness and cruelty implicit in a society about which they have reservations but which they have accepted because "that is the way things are. Those are the facts". As C.W.E. Bigsby points out, the author's main concern in this play is "not with politics but with metaphysics, his main target not the racial bigot but the cynic".11 Silhouetted against the hot-red cyclorama during the final seconds of this drama, the alienated position of the Orderly is defined. He stands, frozen, with his back against the wall. His last words — the closing speech of the play — fill the spectator with horror and dismay: "I never heard of such a thing ... bringing a dead woman here like that... I don't know what people can be thinking of sometimes ..." Literally and physically this man corroborates the view of the status quo that he is a non-person without dignity or human rights who, in order to survive on the periphery of a white cum enemy society, must in the words of the Nurse, "walk a real tight line". In his final gesture he denies not only the worthiness of himself and of his personal aspirations but the concerns of his whole race. As Walter C. Daniel observes, the Orderly becomes a concrete image of the absurdity of his existence "moving steadily from a self-possessed progressive Southern American Negro into the stereotype which the social order demands of him".12 Sadly, the death of Bessie Smith forces the Orderly to reveal himself to be ultimately less concerned about the injustices of the existing social order than about improving his own position within it.13 The greatest irony in The Death of Bessie Smith is the characters' 20

need for commitment in a society that discriminates between those who can be helped and those who cannot. The hierarchy among the whites — the kind of East Side-West Side dichotomy Albee is talking about in The Zoo Story — is indicated first in the opening exchange between the Nurse and the Orderly where for one moment, on the very of making contact, they sourly begin to reflect about the injustices of a system in which a white man with his guts spilling out on the floor comes second to a mayor with piles. The most cynical utterance in this play, however, is the remark the Nurse makes at the very end: "She's no ordinary nigger, she's Bessie Smith." At the beginning of the second scene her father says, "You play those goddam nigger records all the time. Blast my head off; you play those goddam nigger records full blast". Thoroughly oppressed, suffocated by her milieu, the one real emotional outlet the Nurse has is music. Perhaps the only time she lets herself feel and share a feeling with someone or something outside herself is while she is listening to the blues. In this ultimately self-revealing statement she makes a mockery of the theory that art dissolves human barriers. The split between her love of the music and her instinctive disdain for the race which has given such moving voice to a history of frustration and suffering, struggle and failure, is stupefying. That the death of Bessie Smith was a great loss is not the point of this play. Albee is appalled at the members of a society who ask who a man is and what color he is before they will help him. The Nurse is as much fixed by her conditioning as the Orderly is by his; both of them are locked in by the dictatorship of their environment on the one hand and by their instinctual drives on the other. Their insights are cancelled out by their fears. Neither is free to act. However, the Orderly can fool himself and think that he will improve his lot through self-abnegation. It may be suicidal but at least it is a course of action. The Nurse, who does not know who she is on her own terms, is incapable of resolving the doubts she has about her father's world and of seeking knowledge and truth for herself. Accepting the values around her while at the same time despising them, she lives in a state of jangling disharmony with her existence. Her life is a kind of living death. Unable to find the way between paralysis and self-destruction, at the end of the play in effect she falls on her own knife. For Ronald Hayman the Intern is also destroyed.14 Rutenberg feels that the doctor's "one strong action turns out to be as ineffectual as 15 his whole life has been". On the contrary, at the end of the play the 21

Intern begins to live. He breaks out of the vicious cycle of desire for change compounded with inertia. His one strong action is not his futile attempt to do anything about the death of Bessie Smith but the fact that, in order to make the attempt in the first place, he has to defy the albeit idle threats of the Nurse: "Honey ... you going to fix me? You going to have the mayor throw me out of here on my butt? Or are you going to arrange it in Washington to have me deported! What are you going to do ...hunh? Well, honey, whatever it is you're going to do ... it might as well be now as any other time." By going outside to help the colored woman he violates the policy of a segregated, semi-private hospital and forfeits his position. The death of Bessie Smith functions as the catalyst which finally clarifies the Intern's relationship to the woman with whom he works. The energy he needs to free himself from his malaise is engendered in him and he breaks the Nurse's tantalizing sexual hold. She may win their verbal battles but she overemphasizes the power of her anger. In spite of herself, she prepares the way for the Intern's final exit: "We'll just go right along, you and I, and we'll be civil... and it'll be as though nothing had happened ... nothing at all. Honey your neck is in the noose ... and I have the whip ... and 111 set the horse from under you ... when it pleases me." The Intern will have no part of this. The living death of a relationship which Jerry describes in The Zoo Story, "We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other" (by implication the state of Peter's marriage), is not what he really has in mind. He is tired of having his "love" thrown back at him. If he is "impressed" by the Nurse's histrionics, he is still his own man. He makes a choice in the end. It may be youthful but his idealism is not false.16 This is a man who wants to grow. While he is aware of his limitations, he knows he has not reached them yet. His interest in people more clearly and realistically focused now, he may very well become one of the activists who pave the way for the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. At the end of the play the Intern faces what he has looked at and, if somewhat grudgingly, accepted as the 22

Status quo all his life in the city where he was born. He sees that passive identification with liberal causes is not enough and that the time for talking about "action" is over. He can no longer stand by and wait for officials far away to keep "promises". He realizes finally that, in order for him to be able to do something to overcome his "dislike of waste ... stagnation", he does not have to make a journey of many miles. Notes 1. All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, The Sandbox and The Death of Bessie Smith (New York: Signet Books, 1963). 2. In his review of the original New York production of The Death of Bessie Smith in New Yorker, 11 March 1961, p. 14, Whitney Balliet points out that, 'The only indisputable facts about Bessie Smith's death are the accident and the date, September 26, 1937." An article by Stanley Dance in Saturday Review, 29 Aug. 1970, pp. 41-2, called "The 'Empress' Still Reigns" has more information. 'The dramatic and appalling facts are not quite as generally accepted, nor as used by Edward Albee in his play " Mr. Dance continues: "The story was straightened out to some extent in a 1969 Esquire article, The True Death of Bessie Smith,' by Sally Grimes, who had questioned Dr. Hugh Smith, a past president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Smith was the Memphis surgeon who tended the singer alongside the Mississippi highway after her car had plowed into a truck. He was accustomed to dealing with accident victims, and in his view Bessie 'didn't have a prayer to survive' even 'if she'd been hurt with her injuries on the front step of the University Hospital in Memphis.' She was not bleeding to death, but had sustained 'very severe injuries to her chest and abdomen.' What made the situation even more nightmarish was that another car crashed into the surgeon's just as he was preparing to take her into Clarksdale. He now had three patients, including, he said, 'a gentleman who had wrapped his chest over the steering wheel and a lady in the right front seat of his car who was clear up under the instrument panel.' One of the members of Bessie Smith's accompanying band, who came on the scene in a bus shortly afterward, has confirmed that 'the white doctor did all he could to help her.' But what really happened after the ambulances arrived probably will never be known." 3. "Language of Movement in Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith," Twentieth Century Literature, 13, No. 2 (July 1967), 84-8. 4. "The Fun and Games of Edward Albee," American Plays and Playwrights in the Contemporary Theater, p. 85. 5. Tradition and Renewal, p. 28. 6. Michael E. Rutenberg, Playwright in Protest, p. 82. 7. Peter Wolf, 'The Social Theater of Edward Albee," Prairie Schooner, 39, No. 3 (Fall 1965), 253. 8. Earl J. Dias, "Full Scale Albee," Drama Critique, 8, No. 3 (Fall 1965), 107. 9. The description of the action is from the review of the original New York 23

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

24

production of The Death of Bessie Smith by Frank Aston in New York World Telegram and Sun, 2 March 1961. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1972), p. 23. Albee, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), p. 26. "Absurdity in The Death of Bessie Smith," College Language Association Journal, 8, No. 1 (Sept. 1964), 76. See Ronald Hayman, Edward Albee (London: Heineman Educational Books, Ltd., 1971), p. 14. Ibid., pp. 18-19. Rutenberg, p. 80. As Debusscher suggests. See Tradition and Renewal, p. 26.

The American Dream

"From time to time, in the years that have passed, I have suffered losses ... that I can't explain. A fall from grace ... a departure from innocence ...loss ...loss I no longer have the capacity to feel anything I am ...but this ...what you see."1 The American Brecon is a nightmarish mad-cap cartoon. Its abrasive satire further explores themes already signaled in The Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith and continues the author's attack "on the substitution of artificial values for real values", his condemnation of "complacency, cruelty, emasculation and vacuity".2 Explicitly the battle field of this one-act play is the institution of marriage and the family. It was the author's intention "to offend as well as to entertain"3 when he wrote The American Dream. Predictably, amid the accolades which the young playwright received when this work was first produced in New York, he met with accusations of nihilism, immorality and defeatism. However, as Anne Paolucci observes, "In (Albee's) hands the polemic against the American family becomes a commentary on all human relationships".4 In this play the author investigates the materialism, opportunism and hypocrisy built into the kind of marriage which is used as a social device for passing on property and producing children. Again he exposes the villainy of conformism and spiritual aridity, and emphasizes the dangers of emotional crippling in the family. He is seriously concerned with the void between husband and wife, parent and child, as well as with the problem of the rejection of the aged. In quick, blatant brush strokes Albee outlines his cartoon characters: the domineering wife and her tired, supine businessman husband; a dizzy, busy club-woman; a wily, warmly winning Grandmother; and a beautiful Young Man. Sharp, often racy dialogue and imbecilic cross-talk underscore the inanity of conversation between non25

listening partners. In an unrestrained flow of incongruous free association, petty, disagreeable thoughts usually hidden behind the make-yourself-athome-ritual emerge: "My, what an unattractive appartment you have!"; "Are you sure you're comfortable? Won't you take off your dress?" In the overall craziness and hilarity of this play, the underlying hollowness of this caricature family resound. The American Dream takes place in the living room of Mommy and Daddy and it has a bizarre plot. When the play begins husband and wife are sitting opposite each other on gilded, white brocade chairs exchanging insipid small talk, quibbling with Grandma and waiting for "them". Grandma, whose most characteristic line is "None of your damn business", mysteriously piles nicely wrapped boxes in the middle of the floor. There is nothing about the room which suggests intimacy or personality. Over the sofa and decorating the rear wall hangs an elaborate, empty gilt picture frame with two crossed American flags on top of it.5 The symbolism of the decor is transparent. By the time the doorbell rings and "they" arrive in the shape of busy Mrs. Barker, Mommy and Daddy no longer remember why they invited her and she has forgotten why she has come. Grandma, however, knows that Mrs. Barker represents the Bye-Bye Adoption Agency. Disappointed with the first "bumble" they bought some twenty years before and bent on "satisfaction", Mommy has decided to buy a new one. While Mommy, Daddy and Mrs. Barker are all off-stage in a labyrinth of disappearing rooms searching for a glass of water — and, at one point, for each other — the doorbell rings again. A handsome Young Man appears looking for work. "I'll do almost anything for money", he announces. He is the American Dreaml "Clean-cut, midwest farm boy type, almost insultingly good-looking in a typically American way. Good profile, straight nose, honest eyes, wonderful smile ..." Grandma agrees: "My, my, aren't you something!" Briefly, during the exchange between Grandma and the Young Man, the tone becomes more serious. As it turns out he is the identical twin of the infant Mommy and Daddy adopted years ago who died of mutilation. The Young Man explains how over the years he suffered inexplicable losses: "Once ... it was as if all at once my heart... became numb ... almost as though I... almost as though ...just like that... it had been wrenched from my body ... and from that time I have been unable to love. Once ... I was asleep at the time ... I awoke, and my eyes were burning. And 26

since that time I have been unable to see anything, anything, with pity, with affection ... with anything but ... cool disinterest. And my groin ... even there ... since one time ... one specific agony ... since then I have not been able to love anyone with my body. And even my hands ... I cannot touch another person and feel love. And there is more ... there are more losses, but it all comes down to this: I no longer have the capacity to feel anything." The Young Man is related to the protagonist of The Zoo Story. Like Jerry's two empty picture frames, like the empty gilded frame draped with American flags hanging on Mommy and Daddy's living room wall, the plight of this beautiful human shell calls attention to the betrayal of promise as well as to the failure of a dream — both on the political and on the personal level. Grandma tells the Young Man that she recently won twenty-five thousand dollars in a baking contest and that she has secretly been preparing for her departure from the vacuous household. "You've found yourself a job", she tells him. "You'll have to play it by ear, my dear." First she asks him to carry her boxes downstairs and then, while he is gone, she puts Mrs. Barker "on the right track". Confident that Mommy will be pleased, Grandma arranges with the dizzy clubwoman for the Young Man to fall in as the second adopted son. When she is introduced to her new "bumble", Mommy is thrilled. "Now, this is more like it," she exclaims. "Really top notch; much better than the other one." While everyone is standing around drinking a toast to "satisfaction", Grandma — who by this time has slipped away — appears down stage right near the foot lights and addresses the audience: "Well, I guess that just about wraps it up. I mean, for better or worse, this is a comedy, and I don't think we'd better go any further. No definitely not. So let's leave things as they are right now ... while everybody's got what he wants ... or everybody's got what he thinks he wants. Good night dears!" It is begging the question for critics to say that Albee is justified in denouncing the evil aspects of "misguided feminism"6 or in demonstrating Mom's need to be boss to its "logical and ridiculously grotesque conclusion the tyrant-ogre who imposingly goes about squelching any and 27

all who come into intimate contact with her".7 Rutenberg even goes so far as to quote from Philip Wylie's 1942 polemic against "momism": "I give you mom, I give you the destroying mother ... I give you the angel — and point to the sword in her hand ... I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion the black widow spider who is poisonous and eats her 8 mate." In his review of the original New York production of The American Dream in The New Yorker, Whitney Bailie t gives a vivid description of Mommy. "Thin lipped and snakefaced, she speaks in a voice that alternates between needles and syrup. She moves her shoulders in witch fashion in a series of sharp zig-zags, and is smartly overdressed in a purple velvet suit, pounds of gold jewelry, and ugly harlequin glasses."9 It is not a pretty picture. Yet the author's treatment of the woman in this play is hardly less merciful than his handling of the man. In The Death of Bessie Smith Albee touches on the problem of the debilitating influence of a father on a daughter. In The Zoo Story the effect Peter's weekend withdrawal from the family has on the development of his two girls is implied. As Gilbert Debusscher observes, much as the baleful influence of the woman on the family and the mother on her children has been pointed out in the American theater, "there is at least as much to say on the docility of husbands and the weakness of off-spring".10 It is a violation of the author's overall intentions to use the word "emancipated", as Rutenberg does11, to describe Mommy. She is hideous but she is also a brilliant satirical comment on the product of a society which encourages a woman to believe that marriage and motherhood are the only solutions to the problem of living. Grandma talks about Mommy as a child: "When she was no more than eight years old she used to climb on my lap and say, in a sickening little voice, 'When I gwo up, I'm going to mahwy a wich old man; I'm going to set my little were end right down in a tub Ό butter, that's what I'm going to do!" With the ambivalence of the Southern belle the Nurse in Bessie Smith glosses over her ambitions with romantic daydreams. From her earliest years, however, Mommy espouses a philosophy of pragmatic accommodation. Her most typical line is "/ can get satisfaction, but you can't". She is a caricature of the woman who makes no attempt to provide for herself, 28

much less to define herself socially, independently of a man. In admittedly grudging exchange for the gratification of his sex drive, she let Daddy support her. Both Mrs. Barker and Mommy display a penchant for pornography but neither woman appears to have ever shown much interest in a sexual relationship with her husband. Apparently Mr. Barker is nicely out of the way "in a wheel chair"; Daddy has had "an operation tubes now, where he used to have tracts". To its logical and ridiculously grotesque conclusion, Albee demonstrates the last stage of a marriage whose chief motivating force is economic and social. By implication this is the kind of arrangement Peter is taking refuge from on his park bench in The Zoo Story; it is also the sort of marriage in which the Intern unwittingly is trying to entangle himself in The Death of Bessie Smith. As Mommy cheerfully tells Daddy, "I have a right to live off you because I married you and because I used to let you get on top of me and bump your uglies; and I have a right to all your money when you die". In the marriage which Albee is attacking, sex is treated not as an act of consummation but as an act of consumption. A potential avenue of real intimacy traveled without feeling and commitment has degenerated into mechanical physiological reflex. The human beings involved remain alone and the process of depersonalization is complete. The metaphor of sexual possession is extended to include possession of things. Mommy's scatterbrained story of the beige hat, "perhaps the most tedious anecdote ever forced on Battered Man by Dull Woman" 12 , contrary to the opinion of Brian Way, does symbolize something deeper than a trick to get the play started.13 As Ronald Hayman points out, in addition to providing a comment about the way Mommy spends her time and Daddy's money, this episode also underscores her consumer attitude toward everything and everybody — especially toward the first adopted child which she treated as if he were a piece of goods that could be returned to a shop.14 The mutilation and eventual dismemberment of the first "bumble" which Grandma describes to Mrs. Barker when they are alone — much to the club-woman's delight — is Grand Guignol. It is the logical and ridiculously grotesque conclusion of the type of marriage which Albee is portraying. Mommy is depicted as a woman who is obsessed with appearances. She entered into a marriage which was a calculated economic and social arrangement. Without a real emotional relationship with her husband or a sense of her own worth apart from her provider, with a child — albeit an adopted one — as the only tangible product of her life, she treated the 29

"bumble" as a function of herself rather than as an individual. "Things started going badly", Grandma tells Mrs. Barker: "Weeeeellll... in the first place, it turned out the bumble didn't look like either one of its parents. That was enough of a blow, but things got worse. One night, it cried its heart out, if you can imagine such a thing But that was only the beginning. Then it turned out it only had eyes for its Daddy Well she did (gouge those eyes right out of its head). That's exactly what she did. But then, it kept its nose up in the air (How disgusting) they thought. But then, it began to develop an interest in its you-know-what Well, yes, they did (cut off its hands at the wrists) eventually. But first, they cut off its youknow-what But after they cut off its you-know-what, it still put its hands under the covers, looking for its you-know-what. So, finally, they had to cut off its hands at the wrists And it was such a resentful bumble. Why, one day it called its Mommy a dirty name. Of course (they cut its tongue out)! And then, as it got bigger, they found out all sorts of terrible things about it, like: it didn't have a head on its shoulders, it had no guts, it was spineless, its feet were made of clay ... just dreadful things So you can understand how they became discouraged For the last straw, it finally up and died; and you can imagine how that made them feel, their having paid for it and all." Mommy never treated Daddy or the child as people with individual needs and desires separate from herself, but rather as instruments through which to gain satisfactions chiefly self-aggrandizing. They are both necessary to her because without them she has no sense at all of her identity or purpose in life. The picture of this middle aged couple sitting in their gilded living room is as grimly funny as it is outrageous. In spite of all the years shared there is only emptiness between them. Mommy has occupied her time and amused herself by moving "from one apartment to another, up and down the social ladder". Daddy, who dutifully earned the money for the family up to his retirement, no longer has anything to do. Indefatigable Mommy keeps busy buying hats and children. Daddy has reached the point where he would just like to "go away". Poor Daddy. Mommy is still actively thinking up success images for him. As she tells Mrs. Barker, "all his life, Daddy has wanted to be a United States Senator; but now ... why now he's changed his mind, and for the rest of his life he's going to want to be Governor... it would be nearer the apartment, you know".

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Daddy is portrayed as the victim of the same social forces which warped the nature of the woman he married. This couple were not able to find equilibrium in their relationship — a good-humored, happy balance between self-sufficiency and interdependency. If Daddy let himself be intimidated by Mommy's attitude toward mature sex, however, and if he neglected to establish a sense of his own worth as a human being apart from his role of good provider, it is an expression of his own inadequacy and lack of imagination as a partner. Spiritually impoverished, physically disintegrated, as broken down as the appliances in his apartment, holloweyed Daddy presents an unattractive but effective satirical comment on the last stage in the life of the proverbial business man. "At any rate you're very well provided for" is about all he can say for himself. It is not just Mommy's fault. It is not only because he let himself be bullied and badgered by a gold-digging woman but also because of the nature of the commitment he made to a life of work in the world of the status quo. This world whose essential nature is restrictive and deadening offers no guarantee that the time, energy and effort devoted to monotonous, routine tasks will necessarily ever be rewarded by anything more substantial than the steady pay envelope which every good Daddy hands over to his Mommy so she can buy things. Meanwhile, since he puts up with it, Daddy can measure the accumulation of material acquisitions against the missing warmth of a love relationship that might have grown between two selfrealizing people. Having fulfilled his role as "breadwinner" Daddy's most typical line is "I just want to get everything over with". Albee's caricature in this play is of the man who spends his life earning money and then, when he stops, wakes up to discover that he has no further reason to live. He rapidly dwindles into a comatose, acquiescent, puttering old man. Mrs. Barker is a parody of the wife at the other extreme from Mommy. Her most characteristic line, "I feel so lost... not knowing why I'm here", underscores the absurd situation of the woman who does not know who she is. Disenchanted with home and family, she seeks satisfaction in a variety of Responsible Citizens Activities, Ladies Auxiliaries and other good works. In her giddy search for self-definition it is quite logical for her to take off her dress in order to be more "comfortable". After all, a man takes off his jacket for the same reason. Albee's biting satirical treatment of Mommy and Mrs. Barker as well as of Daddy is certainly not, as Kenneth Hamilton sees it, a rejection of the adult world, a "retreat from civilized values to a fancied primitivism".15

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The Young Man's catalogue of proxy mutilations and Grandma's story of bringing-up-baby are powerful, vivid metaphors for what may well be called the most baneful form of maternal or paternal deprivation — the failure of the parent to respectfully acknowledge the individual identity of the child. In this erratic domestic farce the partners' inability to procreate contributes an important ingredient to aggravate the feelings of impotence, guilt, insecurity and inferiority which make it impossible for two people to accept and love one another in a generous way. In Albee's plays social standards repeatedly emerge as defenses against the pain of private suffering. The introduction of the second child at the end of The American Dream becomes one more obstacle in the way of communication between husband and wife. As Mommy rushes to make the acquaintance of her new "bumble", Daddy once more gets pushed to the side. In Albee's gilded chamber of horrors, however, the Young Man will not "meet the fate of his hapless brother"16 as Jordan Miller suggests. On the contrary, he will be exactly what Mommy wants him to be. As the golden boy says to Grandma, "I have no talents at all, except what you see ... my person; my body, my face. In every other way I am incomplete, and I must therefore ... compensate". Since the Young Man has no individual identity, since he is without emotions or a will of his own, he is prepared to accept any syntax around him. Just before the end of the play Mommy sidles up to him: "You don't know how happy I am to see you! Yes sirree. Listen, that time we had with ...with the other one. I'll tell you about it some time Maybe ... maybe later tonight." Like a huge plastic mail-order doll the Young Man will be what ever Mommy wants him to be without offering any resistance at all. And she will get "satisfaction"! Representing energy, resourcefulness, wit, individuality and judgement, Grandma saves the day. Talking about Grandma the author says, "she departs from a form of life that is a great deal more dead than anything else. I guess I specifically meant her to die, but not in the sense that we understand die; to move out of the death within life situation that everybody else in the play was in".17 It is a distortion of Albee's intentions to say that he is attacking marriage and the family as such. In his extreme, satirical cartoon The American Dream, however, he is effectively demonstrating the danger of accepting too readily the values that society puts on marriage. For Albee human relationships are always more important than conventions and social categories, whether they are concerned with class,

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race, politics or religion — or marriage and family. An institution should afford its members room in which they can breathe and move around. Certainly marriage should not be a cage but a medium through which the growth of each member concerned is fostered. This play is an unsentimental investigation of the extremes which can occur when an institution becomes more important than its individual members.

Notes 1. All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York: Signet Books, 1963). 2. Ibid., see author's Preface, pp. 53-4. 3. Ibid., p. 54. 4. From Tension to Tonic, p. 9. 5. The description of the set of the original New York production of The American Dream comes from the following reviews: Whitney Balliet, New Yorker, 4 Feb. 1961; Life, 28 July 1961. 6. See Gilbert Debusscher, Tradition and Renewal, p. 41. 7. Michael E. Rutenberg, Playwright in Protest, p. 65. 8. Ibid., p. 44. 9. New Yorker, loc. cit. 10. Debusscher, p. 39. 11. Rutenberg, p. 67. 12. Thomas Meehan, The Villager, 9 Feb. 1961. 13. "Albee and the Absurd: The American Dream and The Zoo Story," American Theater: Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, No. 10, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 206. 14. See Edward Albee, (London: Heinemann Educational Books, Ltd., 1971), p. 23. 15. "Mr. Albee's Dream," Queens Quarterly, 70, No. 3 (Autumn 1963), 398. 16. "Myth and the American Dream: O'Neill to Albee," Modern Drama, 7, No. 2 (Sept. 1964), 195. 17. Rutenburg, "Interview with Edward Albee, March 17, 1965," p. 217.

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The Sandbox

"There's no respect around here around here!"1

There's no respect

While working on The American Dream Albee received a commission to write a brief play for the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds.2 He took Grandma, Mommy and Daddy, and the handsome, hollow Young Man and placed them outdoors in a fourteen-minute sketch which he called The Sandbox. This play ends with the death of Grandma. Near the close of The American Dream Grandma steps outside the action and addresses the audience. In The Sandbox the spectator is continuously reminded that he is watching a play. The author deliberately parodies theatrical conventions in order to satirize the vacuity and hypocrisy of a death watch. All the characters self-consciously play roles in a ceremony which is being put on for the sake of appearances. Mommy and Daddy, after all, are not concerned with expressing real feelings. They are dedicated to the principle of conforming outwardly to what they believe other people expect of them. With pride and conviction Mommy says, "It pays to do things well". As Debusscher observes, this short play is concerned with the "shameless organized exploitation which encourages the survivors to buy peace of mind about the deceased they have abused or ignored while they were alive".3 Mommy and Daddy do put on a good show. After three off-stage rumbles, when they think Grandma is dead, Mommy says, "Our long night is over. We must put away our tears, take off our mourning ... and face the future. It's our duty". When The Sandbox begins, a Young Man wearing swimming trunks is standing alone on the stage behind a sandbox doing calesthenics with his arms. He is playing the Angel of Death. Busy, bossy Mommy, who is really only thinking of herself, and her acquiescent Daddy, ever anxious to avoid an argument, make their first appearance. "This will do

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perfectly ... don't you think so, Daddy? There's sand there and the water beyond." The husband answers vaguely, "Whatever you say, Mommy". The self-appointed stage manager calls in a hired Musician, a clarinetist,4 and directs him to the left of the stage to a chair. "Very nice, very nice", she says. While Mommy drags Daddy off into the wings again, the Musician nods to the Young Man and begins to play. Mommy and Daddy return to "the beach" carrying Grandma under her armpits as if she were a small child. They dump her into the sandbox complete with pail and shovel. As Anne Paolucci observes, in this abstracted situation the humor grows out of the painful juxtaposition of pathos and meanness.5 A helpless and dependent old woman is brought to the edge of the source of life to die. While Mommy and Daddy sit on chairs and "wait", Grandma takes an animated interest in what is going on around her. She growls and throws sand at Mommy and angrily tells the Musician to stop playing. "I'm a feeble old woman", she says; "How do you expect anybody to hear me over that peep! peep! peep!" She fills the audience in on her background: "I'm eighty-six years old! I was married when I was seventeen. To a farmer. He died when I was thirty I had to raise that big cow over there all by my lonesome What's next to her there ... that's what she married. Rich? I tell you ... money, money, money. They took me off the farm ...which was real decent of them ...and they moved me into a big town house with them ... fixed a nice place for me under the stove ... gave me an army blanket ... and my own dish ... my very own dish! So, what have I got to complain about. Nothing, of course. I'm not complaining." Grandma takes notice of the Young Man who is standing behind her waving his arms like beating and fluttering wings. When she asks him what his name is, he replies, "I don't know ... I mean they haven't given me one yet... the studio". Like the Young Man in The American Dream, this body-building beach boy has no individuality or identity of his own. He just looks good and keeps flashing his endearing smiles. It is fitting that he plays the Angel of Death. His superficiality and vapidity represent deathin-life. When Grandma shouts to the off-stage electrician that the time has come for it to get dark, the lights start to dim. The Musician softly plays 35

an angular twelve-tone commentary.6 When the off-stage rumbles occur and the lights go out, Grandma starts to cover herself with sand. She plays dead but continues to make references to the proceedings, especially to Mommy's euphemistic double talk: "That's right kid; be brave. You bear up; you'll get over it."; "Take off your mourning ... face the future ... Lordy!"; "It pays to do things well ... Boy oh boy!" As C.W.E. Bigsby points out, Grandma's recognition of their cliche's for what they are reaffirms the existence of other values.7 There is also splendid irony in the thought of Mommy and Daddy facing the future together. Nevlin Vos observes that the action of an Albee play frequently involves a ritual deathwatch.8 However, in The Sandbox the process of Grandma's dying does not result in purgation, purification or reconciliation in either of the watchers. The experience does not touch them. All closed down with nothing to say to each other any more, Mommy and Daddy leave the scene with the same indifference and insensibility with which they arrived. Throughout the play Grandma is conscious of her role in a ceremony. Suddenly she realizes that her part is real: "I can't get up. I... I can't move..." The Young Man interrupts her, "Uh ... ma'am; I... I have a line here". In an amateurish way he announces that he is the Angel of Death: "I am ... uh ... come for you." Grandma looks death in the face and accepts it without fear. The music changes to a simple lyrical piece which complements the closing mood of the play.9 As the old woman says in· The American Dream, "You've got to have a sense of dignity 'cause if you don't have that, civilization is doomed". In the candor of her dying at the end of the play, Grandma makes peace with a long life filled with uncertainty, disappointment and loss. Graciously she compliments the Young Man on the delivery of his little speech. She gives the benediction at her own funeral. As she closes her eyes, the Angel kneels beside her. kisses her on the forehead and clasps her crossed hands.

Notes 1. All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, The Sandbox and The Death of Bessie Smith (New York: Signet Books, 1963). 2. Gilbert Debusscher, Tradition and Renewal, p. 30. 3. Ibid., p. 32. 4. Walter Ken describes the kind of musician it is in his review of the original production of the play in \hsNew York Herald Tribune, 17 May 1960. 5. From Tension to Tonic, p. 26.

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6. Paul M. Cubeta, Modem Drama for Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 598. 7. Albee, p. 30. 8. "The Process of Dying in the Plays of Edward Albee," Educational Theater Journal" 25, No. 1 (March 1973), 81. 9. Cubeta, Modern Drama for Analysis, loc. cit.

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

"Truth and illusion, don't you know the difference?"1 In his first full length play, a disturbing drama of human error, disappointment and frustration, Edward Albee explores personal failure in a serious, compassionate examination of the middle phase in the life of a Mommy who tried in vain to solve the problems of her existence in marriage and motherhood, and of a Daddy who found society's definition of success wanting. Albee has said that the two main characters in Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are named after George and Martha Washington and that their illusory child represents an attempt to explore the success or failure of American revolutionary principles. However, he has also made it quite clear that this is not its most important point.2 In this as in all his plays the author's sharpest thrusts are aimed at self-delusion and at the materialism, opportunism and cannibalism built into the institution of marriage. Virginia Woolf takes place in the living room of a couple in a small, Eastern college town called New Carthage. The husband, George, is an Associate Professor of History. His wife, Martha, is the daughter of the college founder and president. The action of the play (which has been described somewhat wistfully as a "long night's journey into daze"3) occurs late on a Saturday night in the fall. After a party in the home of the college president welcoming new faculty members, George and Martha privately entertain a bright, young Biology Instructor, Nick, and his twenty-six year old wife, Honey. Three and a half hours long audiencetime, the play covers the period between two and seven a.m. Lee Baxandall describes the appearance of the stage in the original New York production: "Tasteful home, with fitted recessed bookshelves, hi-fi, curtains, fireplace, early American period furniture, wrought iron colonial eagle, an American flag queerly reversed, an impressionist painting over the mantel — the comforts of modern living side by side with rough-

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hewn tokens of the revolutionary past but dominating them."4 However, as Alan Schneider, the first director of the play, points out: "The set isn't real. It has all kinds of angles and planes that you wouldn't ordinarily have, and strong distortions. (Albee) wanted the image of a womb or a cave, some confinement a room that's a hole they had to stay within We certainly never thought of it as being realistic."5 "Fun and Games", "Walpurgisnacht" and "Exorcism", the titles of the three acts, as well as the lateness of the hour and the enormous quantities of alcohol consumed should further discourage any tendency to approach this drama as "straight, cozy prose". "Fun and Games" starts the moment Martha comes staggering and cursing through the front door at two a.m. that Saturday night after the faculty gathering —with George "Shhhhhhhmg" close behind. Her disgust with herself and her life and her bitterness about "the whole arrangement" are precariously near the surface. "What a cluck you are", she snaps at George. When she unexpectedly announces that Nick and Honey are about to arrive for a night-cap, she really exasperates him. Then, before the party-after-the-party begins, Martha exposes the raw nerve of frustration and loss whose pain will overwhelm and defeat her by morning: "You didn't do anything; you never do anything; you never mix. You just sit around and talk." Virago, harridan, termagant wife: Martha has been called many names. The prevailing view, which does an injustice to the author's overall intention, is that the first of the several themes of this play is the emotional castration of the male by the female in American society and that Martha's dissatisfaction does not go beyond the fact that George lacks a public relations personality.6 Albee himself has said that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is "about the ways people get through life" and that the title means "who's afraid to live without illusions".7 Existing criticism does not come to terms with the problems of the complicated human being Martha represents or with the reasons for her behavior. In a literal interpretation of the play which does not extend the characters' significance beyond the most obvious realistic context, John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, nevertheless makes a statement which is useful as a starting point in an attempt to understand Martha, especially because he considers her Albee's most expert creation. "Every member of a university or college faculty knows this woman. She is assertive, rowdy and roughtalking In the tightly knit family of teachers and scholars, people who live close to each other and their work, she is determined that, 39

while her sex may keep her out of classrooms and faculty meetings, it damn well won't keep her out of conversations and academic politics."8 A hint of the mentality behind Galbraith's words, which serves to stress their importance in an interpretation of Martha's character, is heard when Nick, eager to make a good impression on the daughter of the college president, emphasizes how much he appreciated the faculty party that started off the fall semester earlier that night: "Meeting everyone, getting introduced around ... getting to know some of the men." The point is not that Albee is depicting a victim of sexual discrimination in academia. There is no evidence that Martha takes any interest in teaching or scholarship — or anything else. Rather, the author is describing what happens when a potentially powerful human being is discouraged by family, education and society from having personal goals. Her intelligence and imagination undirected, her great energy dissipated in vain, vicarious living, Martha is the victim not only of her lack of self-esteem but also of her own thwarted aggressiveness. Instinctively, in order not to utterly destroy herself, she aims a steady, merciless stream of abuse at her husband. By the time the play begins, in spite of her real dependence on him, Martha has been punishing George for twenty odd years because he stubbornly remained himself and refused to become the fulfillment of her ambitions. Several facets of Martha have already been explored in the one-act plays: obliquely in the off-stage character of Peter's wife, whose presence like a shadow around the man on the park bench seems to say he can keep the love as long as he brings home the paycheck; in the Nurse who is torn by her magnolia and moonshine notions of romance, the sexual urgency of a mature woman, and her deep need to define herself socially in the image of a successful man; and in Mommy, the logical consequence of whose need to exist in the other leads to the symbolic dismemberment of the first adopted son. Not unlike these women, Martha wittingly sought her identity and self-esteem in the person and the life of the man she married and in the career she planned for him. She also sincerely wanted a child. However, her major concern was an association with a husband who would make her appear interesting and important in the eyes of other people — particularly her father. Martha is not a pleasant person but she is portrayed with sympathetic detail. Her mother died when she was still quite young. Her father remarried and sent her off to a convent school. In effect, she was rejected as a child. The imagined rapport with her father is the primary fantasy rooted

40

at the base of this woman's heart. In view of his hasty annulment of her marriage to the gardener's boy when she was a sophomore at college, her idealization of the college president is clearly a form of self-delusion. Near the end of the play George brings the truth out into the open when in so many words he tells Nick and Honey that Martha's father "really doesn't give a damn whether she lives or dies, and couldn't care less what happens to his only daughter". The baleful influence of father on daughter is implicit in The Zoo Story and touched upon in The Death of Bessie Smith. In this play, although the father remains an off-stage character, the consequences of the unsuccessful relationship are treated in greater depth. Shortly before the Second World War, Martha, a big, bright, energetic girl came back home from "Miss Muffs" and "sort of sat around for a while". Her liberal arts education at a fancy ladies' finishing school did not really prepare her for anything more practical than to be able to distinguish the correct usage of words like "abstruse" and "abstract" and to toss foul language around in French. She acted as hostess for the college president and waited. When George finally "came along" unmarried (unlike most of the new men), Martha, almost thirty years old and very much on the look-out for a husband, "fell for him". He was going to be the groom who would be groomed, first to take over his own department and then eventually the college itself. "It was something/had at the back of my mind", says Martha when she tells Nick and Honey about her courtship days — before she paints her version of a "portrait of a man drowning". "I got the idea about then that I'd marry into the college ... which didn't seem to be quite as stupid as it turned out." As a young woman living at home and daydreaming about her future instead of creating it herself, Martha could not have anticipated that the man she would fall in love with would have his own ideas about how he was going to fulfill himself or that they would be unable to have a child together. When the play begins, like Bette Davis in the movie whose title she cannot remember, Martha is a very discontented fifty-two year old housewife. She is desperately struggling to hold on to her illusions in the frightening face of the realization that she is growing old and that none of her dreams have come true. In a house that is "a dump" to her, with a husband who is "a bog" to her, in a life without any tangible extension of herself, Martha is in the stranglehold of nothingness. By the middle of Act Two, overcome with fury and a sense of loss, she turns on George: "It 41

finally snapped! And I'm going to have it out, and I'm not going to give a damn what I do and I'm going to make the damned biggest explosion you ever heard." Acting in the capacity of drama critic, in 1964 John Kenneth Galbraith recognizes a type of faculty wife in Albee's Martha, someone whose sex keeps her out of classrooms and whose behavior implicitly stems from frustration. In a reflection of this cultural climate, a character in the play reports that he is pleased to have had the opportunity earlier that night to get to know "some of the men" at the faculty party. The question that needs to be asked at this point is whether things might have turned out less "stupid(ly)" for everyone concerned if this intelligent, verbal and dynamic woman had been encouraged by her father and by the society around her to prepare herself to become eligible to succeed the college president. As she is depicted Martha is a woman who has wasted her life. First she let her most productive years go by while she daydreamed and waited for a husband. When she found one who would not let himself be molded to suit her designs, she devoted half of her remaining energies to persecuting him for not having any "personality", for being "no good at trustees' dinners (and) fund raising". The other half she spent drowning in self-pity for not having been able to give birth to the child she imagines would have provided her existence with meaning. As Thomas E. Porter observes, the ultimate convention which is being attacked in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the notion that salvation comes from some agent outside the individual.9 Martha wanted to marry a man who would make her father notice her, someone he would be proud of and consider worthy to become his successor. Because of her lack of self-esteem and personal goals, Martha was not really as interested in the man she married as she was in her idea of what she could be through a man. In effect her love for he r husband is a form of narcissism and her dream for him more real to her than George himself. The meeting between this man and woman turns out to be a confrontation between a fantasist and an idealist. Promising, young and available, the "ABMAPHID" who arrived at New Carthage and saw Martha, said yes and came to rest. However, he had no intention of being turned into the image of his father-in-law. In his "clumsy, old-fashioned way" George fell in love with the college president's daughter, swore an oath and committed his life to her. In essence though, if somewhat compromised, George remained his own man. 42

In order to prove to herself that she really exists and that she is interesting, Martha is loud and vulgar. She channels her considerable resources into noisy, unrestrained behavior, heavy drinking and a series of "crummy, totally pointless infidelities". By turns this woman plays at wearing the pants and being the "Earth Mother". Missing no opportunity to make an eye-catching spectacle of herself, she reminds the young men on campus that, if she is not the wife of the man who runs the History Department, she is the daughter of the college president and therefore a "somebody" to be reckoned with. Lonely, frustrated, middle-aged Martha makes a last-ditch stand flaunting her post-menopausal charms. She is not completely unaware of what she is doing, however. In Act Three she says to Nick, "You're ambitious, aren't you, boy? You didn't chase me around the kitchen and up the goddamn stairs out of mad, driven passion, did you now? You were thinking a little bit about your career, weren't you?" Commenting on the adultery episode in the play, Peter Wolf observes the irony of the juxtaposition of the on-stage scene where George with the help of Honey plans the death of his and Martha's "son", and the scene offstage in which Martha and Nick engage in a sham act of creation.10 The characterization of Martha is certainly proof of the author's understanding of the problems of unfulfilled people. The social conditioning which encouraged Martha's thwarted expectations, as well as George's idealism and her childlessness are all realities which contributed to her disappointment and sorrow. However, in spite of the material advantages with which she grew up, Martha, given her loveless childhood — not unlike Jerry in The Zoo Story — entered adult life as an emotional cripple who doubted her worth as a human being. She did nothing constructive to help herself to make life bearable for George or for herself. For example, there is little evidence that she ever took pride in homemaking. She makes it quite plain that she is not interested in her husband's personal needs and she denigrates his work whenever she can: "You imitating one of your student's for God's sake?"; "You talk like you were writing one of your stupid papers." All that Martha really does is go shopping. She is "a housewife; she buys things". Without any sense of how she can contribute to improve the quality of her life, expecting all things great and beautiful to come from outside herself, she wallows in disillusionment. With nothing to do that interests her and nothing to live for, she spends her nights leaving a trail of half-filled glasses of gin around the house and her days sleeping off her drunkenness. The residue of her wasted talents and unused 43

energies are released in the form of abusive behavior toward her husband. Her pain makes her ruthlessly egotistical. Fairly considered against her given background, there should be little room for complacency or selfrighteousness in an evaluation of this character. If her selfishness and cruelty make her repugnant, her deep unhappiness and almost dumb suffering should arouse compassion. George, meanwhile, has withdrawn into his own world of History, teaching, writing — and drink: "I'm numbed enough... to be able to take you when we're alone. I don't listen to you ... or when I do listen to you, I sift everything, I bring everything down to reflex response, so I don't really hear you, which is the only way I manage it." Far too much critical attention has been devoted to the "failure" of George. To begin with — salary and status considerations aside —whether or not the fundamental satisfactions gained from teaching and scholarship can be compensated for by the performance of duties related to a high administrative function is a moot point. J.K. Galbraith irrelevantly remarks that the permanent title of Associate Professor is used "by many colleges and universities (including Harvard) with exquisite cruelty to brand their errors in according permanent tenure".11 In his literal interpretation of the play, which is especially useful because he approaches it with the values which the author is criticizing, Mr. Galbraith says that he does not recognize in George "the insecure, protesting, dull" failure he is accustomed to meeting in academia, the "vulnerable and rejected man". Like Nick, this critic is too ready to trust Martha's coloring of the picture. Yet he does in fact see George as "intellectually alert and attractive". He says approvingly, "All college faculties that are worth anything have at least a latent instinct to revolt". However, much as he likes him, Mr. Galbraith finally considers the character of George a contradiction and a contrivance. He loudly misses Albee's point. The ultimate worth and charm and the potentiality for happiness of every human being, after all, does not necessarily rest in his social or academic rank or in his payenvelope — or in the opinion of a frustrated spouse. Like the earlier plays, Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a castigation of a society obsessed with the mystique of success — or the appearance of it. 44

George tries to tell Nick about the way it was at the beginning, when he first came to New Carthage. Unlike the young Biology Instructor who married his wife because he thought she was pregnant and because she had money, George fell in love with Martha, made a promise and came to stay. His parents were dead and he was ready to start his adult life on his own terms. Whatever the truth about his past really is, George worked it out creatively in the form of a novel, the tragic story of a boy who accidently shot his mother and then a year later while trying to avoid hitting a porcupine on the road swerved the car and drove his father into a tree. Commentators have interpreted what they perceive as George's withdrawal and passivity as behavior resulting from his responsibility as an adolescent for the deaths of both parents.12 More in keeping with the play — whose key-phrase spoken throughout by both George and Martha is "Truth and illusion, don't you know the difference?" - is the theory that George's killing of his parents is symbolic but that there is real guilt attached to his need to be cruel.13 This also explains why George waited until it was almost too late before he was able to bring himself to hurt Martha and himself profoundly enough to free them both from the mutually destructive pattern of their married life. As Max Halpem points out, "It is possible to be too kind, too tolerant if Martha is a monster, George by complicity and acquiescence has helped create her, until she has become precisely what he calls her: 'spoiled, self-indulgent, wilful, dirtyminded, liquor ridden ...'"* During the "Walpurgisnacht" George mutters, "I've been trying for years to clean up the mess I made". Nick forces him to stop and think for a moment. He asks George, "Have you been trying for years?" Later, in the middle of the "Exorcism" while Martha is telling the story of Bringing Up Baby she says accusingly, "And George tried". "How did I try, Martha?" Her husband prods for a response: "How did I try?" But by this time he has already had enough: "Once a month and we get misunderstood Martha, the good hearted girl underneath the barnacles, the little Miss that the touch of kindness'd bring to bloom again. And I've believed it more times than I want to remember, because I don't want to think I'm that much of a sucker..." At the end of the play George has taken to heart and applied to Martha the lesson of Jerry in The Zoo Story: "I have learned that neither kindness 45

nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion." From the time that Martha humiliated him in front of her father twenty years ago in the "boxing" incident which — as she herself admits — subsequently colored their whole life together, George has stubbornly remained himself. For him the least dishonorable failure is the only honorable goal. This is the message he tries to communicate to the young Biology Instructor15 but until the very end of the play Nick is too smug and biased to understand. George is kind to and tolerant of Martha; he knows what her problems are and is sorry for her. To a point he even puts up with the warped, one-sided picture of him which she presents to the world around them. Her jokes about his paunch, his lack of physical fitness and his non-existant public relations personality hurt him, but he has enough sense of humor about himself to introduce these subjects to Nick in his own way. However, when Martha loses her grip on the distinction between reality and make-believe, he is compelled to act. First she mentions the fantasy child. Then she tries to degrade her husband by calling him a "bookworm" and a "contemplative". She falsifies and denigrates his motives: "You mean he didn't start in on how he would have amounted to something if it hadn't been for Daddy? How his high moral sense wouldn't even let him try to better himself?" Finally, she disparages the book George wrote which her father forbade him to publish. When Martha thus relentlessly betrays their most private conflicts and deepest griefs, George knows that the time to be "burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events" has come to an end: "You've taken a new tack, Martha that makes it just too much ... too much. I don't mind your dirty underthings in public ... well, I do mind, but I've reconciled myself to that... but you've moved bag and baggage into your own fantasy world now, and you've started playing variations on your own distortions ..." Nevertheless, even before that infamous party-after-the-party, George knows he has to "find some way to really get at (her)" very soon. It is suggested throughout the play that the breakdown in their private area of communication started before the action begins. On the long night's 46

journey into day of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, after three torturous rounds of Humiliate the Host, George initiates a brief but effective retaliatory bout of Get the Guests directed at Nick and Honey. Martha, protective toward the "wave of the future" Biology Instructor and his squeamish little wife, explodes: "I sat there at Daddy's party and I watched the younger men around you, the men who were going to go somewhere. And I sat there and I watched you, sndyou weren't therel And it snapped. It finally snapped!" Martha has gone to almost every extreme by now but she is still "walking her wits". George, however, has reached the limit of his capacity for suffering. This is to be the "stupid liquor-ridden night" when she goes too far. After Hump the Hostess he comes back into the house with a bouquet of snapdragons and starts throwing them at her stem first chanting, "Snap ... Snap". He is elated because he has made up his mind about how to free them both from the vicious cycle of their "vile, crushing marriage". The fantasy child will be destroyed and with it the unpublished book about which he has been so resentful. Martha will no longer be able to use the child as a weapon when she does not get her way; George will no longer be able to blame her for her father's refusal to support him in his creative work: "He was... killed ... late in the afternoon on a country road, with his learner's permit in his pocket, he swerved to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a ... large tree." The two chief excuses for their unhappiness, the two weapons they have both used against each other in their intellectual as well as emotional battles are eliminated in one dramatic action. George's decision, however, is not merely "theatrically punitive" as Ruby Cohn suggests16 or, as Anne Paolucci implies, a response to "demonic spite".17 His bitter tears at the end of Act Two are also shed for his own loss. Nor is it what C.W.E. Bigsby describes as the "calculated sensuality" between Martha and Nick which finally forces George to do something.18 The Associate Professor of History starts goading the bright, up-and-coming Biology Instructor into dropping his guard almost from the moment Nick and Honey arrive for the "nightcap". While the women are upstairs, 47

much to the younger man's embarrassment George announces, "Musical beds is the faculty sport around here". In the opening scene of Act Two between the two men, George deliberately continues to bait Nick: "Until you start plowing pertinent wives, you really aren't working. The way to a man's heart is through his wife's belly, and don't you forget it." Honey is indeed the one who gives George the idea for "guerilla tactics" but, again contrary to Anne Paolucci's opinion, he has assumed command long before the young woman comes stumbling back from the bathroom inquiring, "Who rang?"19 In part unconsciously, in his struggle for survival George has been engineering the proceedings of that fateful night through the sessions of self-abuse, nastiness and violence from the beginning of the play. He has been calling the moves right up to the final stripping away of all illusions — his and his wife's as well as those of Nick and Honey — right up to the ultimate naked confrontation at the very end when he says to Martha, "The doorbell rang it was good old Western Union and he had a telegram I'm afraid our boy isn't coming home for his birthday". Even before George knows for sure that Martha has mentioned their fantasy child, there is no question in his mind that the situation has reached the point where it must change if they are to endure the future. He quite consciously makes the decision to act at the moment that Martha starts to make disparaging comments about his book: "I've got to figure out some new way to fight you, Martha maybe ...internal subversion ... I don't know. Something." Unconsciously, though, he himself brings Martha to the point where she changes her clothes in Act One and mentions the fantasy child to Honey. At two a.m. after spending his Saturday night at his father-in-law's house in the kind of command-performance situation he loathes, George is tired and irritable — barely up to the game of Name the Movie that Martha tries to instigate with her imitation of Bette Davis: "What a dump. Hey, what's that from? 'What a dump!'" His late-in-the-night malaise is exacerbated by Martha's unexpected announcement that the young, blond, goodlooking new man on the faculty — whose name she cannot remember either — is coming around for a drink with his wife, "a mousey little type, without any hips or anything". When he objects, she insists: "Because Daddy said we should be nice to them!" George knows that Martha is disappointed, frustrated and unhappy and that she has been losing her grip on the difference between reality and illusion. To save them both, wittingly as well as unwittingly, he guides Martha to the point from which 48

no escape or evasion is possible. George pauses before he opens the door to admit Nick and Honey and warns his wife six times not to "start in on the bit about the kid!" The revelation of the child as fantasy at the end of the play is the development in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which has caused the most critical dissension and disbelief. Yet very early in Act One George clearly indicates that there is at least one number which Martha does which she is not supposed to do in front of outsiders. Charles R. Lyons also points this out. "Bit, of course, is a theatrical term for an element of stage business, a particular routine; this metaphor sets a frame for the development of the child business as an illusion."20 George refuses to kiss Martha on command, calls her a drunk and tells her there is no "abomination award going" that she has not won. Then, when she is sufficiently contrary and belligerent, he tells her what not to talk about to their guests. "He's mine as much as he is yours", she counters. "I'll talk about him if I want to." This very explicit, deliberate drawnout reference to the child as a private matter between the partners is made at the beginning of the play before the Fun and Games with Nick and Honey get under way. A little later when Martha leaves the room with Honey to show her the "euphemism" and the house, George gives his wife two more suggestive warnings. Contrary to the opinion of Max Halpern, George is not "as concerned with the fantasy's survival as he is with whatever humiliation he might have to endure".21 George is tired of humiliation. He is planting an idea in Martha's head. By making a glib reference to his life at the college and suggesting to Nick that emasculation rather than recommendation are implied when a man marries the daughter of the president of an institution, he stirs up Martha's anger and contempt. Then he autocratically tells her not to "shoot (her) mouth off about ...you-know-what". Martha's retort is vehement: "I'll talk about any goddamn thing I want to, George." Even though he urges his wife to leave the room (with cries of "trot along" and "vanish" for encouragement), during his first private colloquy with Nick in which he himself introduces the subject of children, George is distracted and preoccupied; he is curious about what the women are gossiping about upstairs. When Honey comes back down to the living room and announces that Martha is changing her clothes in order to be more comfortable and then turns to George and says, "I didn't know you had a son", he realizes that the die is cast: "O.K., Martha ... O.K.... you goddamn destructive ..." Martha's absence of any sense of her own worth apart from 49

being the daughter of a college president, independent of her husband's status in the academic community and dissociated from her biological function finally has gotten the better of her. Lacking self-respect, she not only attempts to mutilate George in the eyes of others but she behaves destructively toward herself as well. George realizes that his wife is tugging at the edges of her sanity and that, if there is to be any salvaging of the ruins of their marriage, he has to prevent her from going too far. Later when he says, "I think I'll have you committed", the joke is on himself. At her first serious transgression into fantasy, the Associate Professor of History has no clear plan of action but he knows that once private myths enter public life they have to be destroyed. On this drunken night in front of the two young strangers, Martha relentlessly and mercilessly attacks George and their marriage. After she tells Nick and Honey about the "boxing" incident when she hit him and he "landed ... flat... in a huckleberry bush!" George shoots her with a trick gun. As Charlene Taylor observes, "The boy killed his mother with a shotgun (George's) first symbolic act of violence against Martha also serves as the first foreshadowing of his destruction of her role as mother".22 Verbal pugilism sends Honey retching from the room at the end of Act One when, in an outburst of vindictiveness, Martha insists that George is not a real man because he did not become the Head of the History Department. Then, half way through the "Walpurgisnacht", she scorns her husband's creative work and, in the way she tells Nick about the book he wrote which her father would not let him publish, implicitly denies George and a vital part of his human experience. At this point he grabs her by the throat. When things calm down again, he in his turn initiates a venomous round of Get the Guests to punish Nick for his mindless complicity in Martha's degradation of him and he exposes the young Biology Instructor as a conceited self-righteous career builder. By the end of Act Two, George and Martha have declared "total war" and George knows what he has to do to irrevocably change their lives. It is no mystery to George why his wife singled Nick out from the fifteen new teachers for the after-party-get-together. All evening at her father's faculty gathering she had been eyeing the young men. George knows that she was making comparisons, thinking back to the time he first arrived at New Carthage, twenty-three years old, "A Doctor. AB ... MA ... Ph.D.... ABMAPHID!" with everything ahead of him. He knows that she is obsessed with what she defines as his failure and that she is punishing 50

him for being himself. Seriously, if sadly, he says, "That's very ... impressive", when Martha flaunts Nick's academic precocity at him. She spits back, "You're damned right!" Earlier that night while upstairs with Honey, listening to the younger woman boasting about her husband's achievement of a Master's degree at the age of nineteen, Martha, with nothing to show for her life, keenly feels her jealousy. Yet there is poignancy in her confession after the Exorcism of the fantasy child when she reveals the frame of mind in which she told Honey about him: "Sometimes when it's night, when it's late and ... everybody else is ... talking ... I forget and I... want to mention him ... I hold on ... but I've wanted to so often." In the act of giving the child an existence in the imagination of a third person, she violates the most intimate part of her relationship with George. Ironically, when she crosses the line between reality and fantasy, Martha also frees George to do the one thing which can release them both from the impossible situation they have locked themselves into for twenty-one years. All this occurs on the eve of the boy's majority. It is sentimental to conjecture, as Peter Wolf does, that the enormous personal sadness in the marriage of George and Martha springs from their failure to have a child.23 Albee himself has said that, "With a sensitive, intelligent couple like Martha and George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the fantasy child can be just as real as any real child".24 There is no doubt that, like the couple in The American Dream, this husband and wife's inability to have a child together has complicated and aggravated the tensions and growing hostilities between them over the years. At the same time, however, the presence of one would not have guaranteed them a harmonious life together. As Thomas E. Porter points out, "The (fantasy) child functioned as an actual child of flesh and blood would function in marriage. George and Martha have stayed together 'for the sake of the child'. Albee is ultimately striking at the radical and accepted attitude toward marriage: the child as bond of union between the partners".25 The link which this couple manufacture in the form of the fantasy child is the ultimate irony in a relationship rife with disillusionment and guilt. The childlessness of George and Martha is a blessing in disguise; a real infant born into their marriage would have been born into the unholy cauldron of his mother's and his father's unresolved personal and emotional problems. Ostensibly "Sonny Jim" has kept them together but he has also taken the brunt of the disappointments and frustrations of twentyone years. His treatment as "a bean bag" — which is the way George 51

describes him to Nick — attacks the myth that after biological, much less fantastical, creation a tender, loving bond between the procreators necessarily follows. During the last game of the play, George interrupts Martha's recitation of Bringing Up Baby with a less idealized version of her story: "(A son) who didn't want to be turned into a weapon against his father, who didn't want to be used as a goddamn club whenever (his mother) didn't get things like she wanted them!" Martha answers him in kind: "A son who I have raised as best I can against ...vicious odds, against the corruption of weakness and petty revenges!" As John Gassner observes, "The childlessness of the couple is hardly a cause or an explanation of their real plight, which is their lostness, their state of being".26 The audience which is crucial in motivating the events that lead to the "Exorcism" of the fantasy child go home at seven in the morning thoroughly wilted and shaken. During this harrowing night the illusions of Nick and Honey are also stripped away, but at the end of the play they too are left with an opportunity to re-establish their relationship on a basis of emotional honesty. Like Peter in The Zoo Story, Nick and Honey leam not to jump to conclusions about the appearance of truth. Honey, a Minister's daughter, is not as unworldly as she behaves. She certainly knew how to get her man. Sexually as well as socially she controls things. (If there is any talk about the emasculation of the male by the female it may be applied to Nick who, as George puts it, is "solicitous (to his wife) to a point that faileth human understanding".) Honey lives vicariously through her husband. She introduces herself "in the library, or at the supermarket" as his wife. She boasts about his academic achievements and athletic prowess. After they stayed behind to talk to the college president, it was she who pushed Nick to come to the party-after-the-party at the home of his daughter. As they both stand uncertainly on the threshold of an unexpectedly embarrassing situation, Nick whispers, "I told you we shouldn't have come". Nevertheless, he came. Like the Nurse in The Death of Bessie Smith trying to push the Intern to see the Mayor, Honey is not insensitive to social opportunities which may enhance her man's chances for advancement. "Oh, isn't this lovely", she chirps, admiring the house of the daughter of the college president; "Oh, wasn't that funny", she giggles, laughing at Martha's jokes; "Ohhhhhhhhh! He's a wonderful man", she cries, praising her hostess's father. Each time Nick takes his cue from his wife and gives a perfunctory echo. When Nick takes the initiative to be amicable, for example when he 52

admires the abstract painting on the wall, George immediately cuts him down. From the first moment he has this fellow spotted for an opportunist. All evening George rides Nick about his scientific work. Yet, even though he says the young man disgusts him on principle, George applies Jerry's technique in The Zoo Story of kindness and cruelty and tries to "give (him) some good advice". "Don't try to put me in the same class with you!" Nick sneers; "You just tend to your knitting grandma ... I'll be O.K." Having already decided in his own interest to take Martha's point of view, Nick twice refuses to listen to George's attempts to give him "his side of things". By the end of the play, however, he learns that he still has something to learn and that, as Martha says," (he's) no better than anybody else". Thus George forces not only Martha but also Nick and Honey to participate in the "Exorcism". "You don't want any scandal around here, do you big boy?" he asks. As Martha puts it to her would-be seducer, "Once you stick your nose in it, you're not going to pull out just whenever you feel like it". In the throes of their own personal struggle, George and Martha compel Nick and Honey to face themselves as well. George gives Nick ample food for thought on the subject of professional integrity. As a result of his realization of the truth about Martha, a new tenderness awakens in Nick towards his own wife, feelings which perhaps will assist him in helping Honey overcome her aversion to his sexuality and her fear of pregnancy. As Honey listens to Martha's recitation of Bringing Up Baby, she also gains insight. She begins to understand that there are joys involved in the raising of a child which compensate for the sadness and the pain. Contrary to the opinion of Thomas P. Adler, it is not likely that the young Biology Instructor and his wife will "become the older couple's adopted children, taking the position once filled by the now exorcized illusory child".27 Nick and Honey do not need to become anybody's children. They need to become adults together. At the end of the play, no longer protected by their illusions and face to face with their own failings, Nick and Honey have the opportunity to soothe their painful consciousness by establishing contact on a new foundation of candor and unselfish love. At the beginning of Act Three, feeling somewhat chastened and foolish after the fiasco with Nick, Martha has a moment of total illumination which prepares the way for the last scene of the play. "There is only one man in my life who has ever ... made me happy", she tells Nick. But he still does not understand. It is "George", she says: 53

"George who is good to me, and whom I revile; who understands me, and whom I push off; who can make me laugh, and I hold it back in my throat; who can hold me, at night, so that it's warm, and whom I will bite so there's blood; who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy." Martha is an extreme example of a woman who has sought the answer to her needs in the existence and in the activities of others. As long as she could not come to terms with her unsatisfactory past and live positively and creatively in the present with the man who loves her, there is no evidence that she would have found peace if she had borne six children, or if George had become head of the History Department, president of the college or president of the country. This larger than life characterization of a deeply unhappy woman has a more universal application in so far as a spectator is willing to see beyond the raw language, the emotional and physical violence and the adultery games, and to acknowledge the cruel and self-destructive consequences of an education for conformity which does not take into consideration the needs of the individual. After the "Exorcism", after the young people have learned about the difference between truth and illusion and gone home, in the final tableau Martha leans back against George. "Just ... us?" she asks. "Yes", he answers. The struggle between the man who would not violate his personal integrity and the woman who could not believe in her own worth comes to rest. Whether he lives or dies, whether he is a fantasy or quite real, when a son reaches the age of twenty-one he leaves home. The child is gone now. George has given up his book. He has seen to it that the way has been prepared for a state of emotional honesty, a different kind of relationship between Martha and himself as they enter the second stage of their lives together. There is no ready-made solution at the end of the play. The challenge that lies before Albee's couple is formidable.

Notes 1. All quotations from this play are taken from Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1964). 2. See Ronald Hayman, Edward Albee, pp. 43-4. 3. John McCarten, New Yorker, 20 Oct. 1962, p. 85. 54

4. 'The Theater of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama Review, 9, No. 4 (Summer 1965), 30-1. 5. Richard Schechner, "Reality is Not Enough: An Interview with Alan Schneider," Tulane Drama Review, 4, No. 3 (Spring 1965), 72. 6. Michael E. Rutenberg, Playwright in Protest, pp. 94-5. 7. New York Times, 26 April 1963. 8. "The Mystique of Failure: A Later-day Reflection on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Show, May 1964, p. 112. Mr. Galbraith naively continues, "I am happy to report that I never encountered one who was able to drag men off to bed." In another literal interpretation, "The Riddle of Albee's Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Claremont Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), pp. 203-27, Diana Trilling makes the following observations: "The people in Mr. Albee's play (are) unfamiliar to me they have no counterparts in my actual experience of life." (p. 225) "After living in a university community through most of my mature life, I find myself strangely unprepared for the college Mr. Albee describes, or its faculty; and while I have a sufficiently elaborate imagination to suppose that many wonderful and awful things go on even in my own academic vicinity of which I am kept in ignorance, I'm still moved to comment on Mr. Albee's scene like the Victorian lady at the performance of Macbeth: 'So different from the home life of our own dear Queen.' " (p. 209).

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

In particular the vulgarity of the language in Virginia Woolf does suggest a realistic interpretation. Against the background of the Albee oeuvre as a whole, however, the ironic way the author uses it becomes more explicit and the idealistic nature of the theme comes more clearly into relief. "Fun and Games in Suburbia: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Myth and Modern American Drama (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 245. "The Social Theater of Edward Albee," Prairie Schooner, 39, No. 3 (Fall 1965), 259. Galbraith, Show, p. 112. See in particular Ruth Eva Schultz-Seits, Edward Albee - der Dichter-Philosoph der Bühne (Frankfurt A.M.: Vittorio Klosterman, 1966), p. 46. Porter, Myth and Modem American Drama, p. 243. "What Happens in Who's Afraid...?" Modem American Drama: Essays in Criticism, ed. William Edward Taylor (Florida: Deland, 1968), pp. 134-5. See Tom Prideaux, "The Albee Attitude, Both Sweet and Sour," Life, 14 Dec. 1962, p. 110. During the final rehearsals of the original New York production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee cut out one of George's speeches to Nick because he felt it was too pat, too preachy and sounded like the author intruding his own voice: "Try to learn, teach. I don't hold out much hope for you, things being as they are - people. But, and I trust you've learned this by now, the least dishonorable failure is the only honorable goal." Edward Albee, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 77 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 22. From Tension to Tonic, p. 56. Albee, p. 37. From Tension to Tonic, loc. cit. "Some Variations of Kindermord as Dramatic Archetype," Comparative Drama, l.No. 1 (Spring 1967), 68.

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21. Halpern, "What Happens in Who's Afraid...?" p. 140. This interpretation ignores the rising action as well as the denouement of the plot. 22. "Coming of Age in New Carthage: Albee's Grown-up Children," Educational Theater Journal, 25, No. 1 (March 1973), 59. 23. Wolf, "The Social Theater of Edward Albee," p. 260. 24. Rutenberg, "Interview with Edward Albee, March 17,1965," p. 212. 25. Porter, Myth and American Drama, p. 238. 26. "Broadway in Review "Educational Theater Journal, 15, No. 1 (March 1963), 79. 27. "Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool/?: A Long Night's Journey into Day," Educational Theater Journal, 25, No. 1 (March 1973), 68. At the end of Virginia Woolf, Martha asks her husband, "Just... us?" "Yes", replies George. The function of the exorcism of the fantasy child in Albee's play is to give the older couple the opportunity to confront one another directly without the barrier of a third party between them.

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Tiny Alice

"Lighten my eyes lest I sleep the sleep of death."1 In his first five plays Albee examines the way people use material welfare and social status as props to disguise the emptiness and the loneliness of their lives. "We all peel labels", says George in Virginia Woolf; "When you get down to the bone, you haven't got all the way, yet. There's something inside the bone ... the marrow ... that's what you've gotta get at." In Tiny Alice the author inquires into the role religion can play in forming a buffer between man and his confrontation with things as they are. The many different interpretations of Tiny Alice indicate an unwillingness among critics to come to grips with a work that is not only difficult and provocative, but also painful to grasp. For Howard Taubman Tiny Alice is a modern allegory of the story of Christ with some resemblances to Parcifal.2 Harold Clurman reports that Tiny Alice "tells us that the pure person in our world is betrayed by all parties".3 According to Barry Ulanov the play is about the struggle between good and evil, "the battle of three devils for a good man's soul".4 On the other hand, Philip Roth insists that Tiny Alice is about the triumph of a strong woman over a weak man and that the subject is emasculation.5 W.E. Willeford believes that one of the play's themes is the tyranny of women and the impossibility of a meeting between the sexes.6 Rutenberg, in his turn, is convinced that Albee is mainly concerned with exploring his generation's sense of abandonment 7 , whereas Mary E. Campbell is quite positive that the play's protagonist is a man worthy of his spiritual commitments.8 "The truth," says Arthur Cavenaugh, "is that Tiny Alice is a corrupt work."9 The plot of this drama is a fantasy. As Thomas B. Markus points out, much of the confusion about the play comes from the tendency to interpret it too literally.10 Lawrence Kingsly attributes the lack of agreement to critics' failure to see the pattern of reality and illusion as it develops 57

from the author's previous work.11 "The truth", according to Albee, "is that art isn't easy; it isn't easy for its perpetrators, and it demands of its audience the willingness to bring to it some of the intensity and perception its creator put into it. The more complex the work, the less passive may be the audience. Unless, of course, the audience does not desire participation... far too little is said about the responsibility of an audience."12 Miss Alice is an incredibly rich woman who resides in an enormous castle. She is making several bequests to the Protestants and the Jews, to "hospitals, universities, orchestras, revolutions here and there", and she would also like to give a grant to the Catholic Church: "A hundred million now and the same amount each year for the next twenty." She sends her Lawyer, who is also her lover, to visit the Cardinal — a former schoolmate of his but not a friend — to communicate her intentions and to say that in order for the details of the transaction to be carried out the services of His Eminence's secretary are desired. At their first meeting the Lawyer does not go into the fine print of the proceedings. However, he cynically observes to the Cardinal that "money equals anything you want. Levels! LEVELS THE EARTH AND THE HEAVENS!" It so happens that in her castle, Miss Alice (together with the Butler, her former lover, and the Lawyer) has a dossier on the Cardinal's Brother Julian. There are six years missing from his personal record. The three of them are intrigued by the possible significance of this omission, for they suspect that Julian is the man they are looking for with the qualities of mind and spirit which will make him worthy to serve as a fair exchange for the generous gift to the Church. Ultimately the Cardinal agrees about the price of the grant. It is to be the sacrifice of the gentle and pious Brother Julian to the abstraction of God which he has been struggling to live up to all his life. Just before she seduces him, Miss Alice says, "Might not vast wealth, the insulation of it, make one quite mad?" The author has pointed out that the whole arrangement about the money is a pretext.13 Albee is not attacking the institution of the Church any more than he is attacking great wealth. Rather, he is calling into question the uses that people make of them. Essentially, in this context, as he describes it, Tiny Alice is a "double mystery play and also a morality play about truth and illusion, the substitute images we create ... easy virtues, easy Gods, all the Gods that we create in our own image".14 It is well to note that the playwright uses Christian symbolism ironically. He implies

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that Tiny Alice is best approached "as a piece of music or a dream".15 "(It) is full of symbols and illusions", he admits, but he also warns that, "They are to be taken as echoes in a cave, things overheard, not fully understood at first".16 The play takes place in no particular country or locale and the ages of the characters are not given, although they are meant to be around fifty.17 Brother Julian is the only real flesh and blood character. He is the innocent and, as the author suggests, as unwary as the audience who respond to the unfolding of events along with him.18 C.W.E. Bigsby describes Tiny Alice as an internalized drama — one which is acted out within the mind of the protagonist. "To the extent that this is true, a great deal of the obscurity and ambiguity which lies at the heart of the play can be seen as a direct expression of Julian's own bewilderment."19 In entering the castle it is as if the lay brother is entering the past buried within himself. The people he encounters there may also be better understood if seen as different aspects of his personality. The other characters are individualized but at the same time and more particularly they function as many-face ted symbols for the World, the Flesh, and the Devil — and the Church.20 Anne Paolucci describes the Butler, Miss Alice and the Lawyer as an unholy trinity in which each member expresses himself in characteristic actions. They are also separate persons with their own quirks and idiosyncracies, yet in their very differences each one contributes to the personality of the unity which they represent. "Together they force the action to a single conclusion."21 The particular importance of the reinforcement of the verbal with the visual in Tiny Alice is stressed by Richard Alan Davison.22 Debusscher goes so far as to suggest that its text should be taken not "as a finished literary product but rather as a musical score to which only the execution can give real life".23 Act One is divided into three scenes, each with a decidedly different decor. In scene one the pompous Cardinal, resplendent in "red gown and amethyst", is visited in his garden by the Lawyer who has come to talk about Miss Alice's grant to the Church. Two small winged cardinals in an elaborate birdcage introduce the prevailing metaphor of the play — something small inside something else, a reality to be dealt with in terms of various dimensions. The coarse, cruel, nasty-minded exchange between the men, hardly the kind of dialogue to be expected when two distinguished personages meet, dispels any notion that Tiny Alice is going to be a realistic play. The ominous and threatening atmosphere created 59

in this opening gambit prepares the audience for the sinister and mysterious events to follow. Scene two takes place in the library of the castle in which Miss Alice lives. It is an imposing massive arched room with walls thirty-eight feet high, great doors which swing open seventeen feet tall and seven feet wide, a six-foot candelabra, folio-sized leather-bound volumes on the floor-toceiling shelves, and a huge reading table with a phrenological head conspicuously displayed upon it. The costumes of the characters, mostly shades of grey and pastel, appear to be sharply etched against a bright orange carpet. Prominent in this set where most of the action of the play takes place is a large doll-house model of the castle which lights up.24 Brother Julian immediately notices it when he makes his first call. The Butler who receives him points to the model and asks the visitor a tantalizing question: "Is anyone there? Are we there One feels one should see one's self... almost." In the model, of which the great castle is an extended replica, there is a model of the model "within and within and within". This Chinese-box idea of something small inside something else is repeatedly alluded to throughout the play and is reinforced visually by the almost continuous presence of the model on the stage. When the Lawyer enters the room he immediately begins to intimidate Julian and he tries to provoke him into talking about the six blank years in his file. In scene three the Lawyer presents Julian to Miss Alice in her private blue sitting room upstairs in one of the towers of the castle. The lay brother is in for another surprise when the benefactress of the Church emerges from the depths of a great, wing-backed chair in the shape of a bent and withered old crone. Before'long, however, Miss Alice removes a mask and a matted wig and reveals herself to be a fascinating mature woman. By this time the mood of the play is established. In this castle things are not what they appear to be. There is a foreshadowing here of the stripping away of illusions which Julian is about to undergo. The theme of something small inside something else is reiterated in this scene when Miss Alice tells him that she has a personal chair in every room: "It is such a large ... establishment that one needs the feel of specific possession in every ... area." In spite of the bewildering events, the lay brother easily gives his confidence to Miss Alice. In subtle ways she begins to lure him into making the pledge of service and sacrifice which he has been dreaming about all his life but unable to bring himself to experience and realize. After he leaves her presence, the Lawyer appears in Miss Alice's

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bedroom door. Then, punctuating a verbal command, he sits down in her so