by RICK DANLEY // November 29, 2018
Marriage is the fat on which the modern American theater has feasted for years. Tennessee Williams. William Inge. Eugene O’Neill. Neil Simon. Sam Shepard. Sarah Ruhl. Tracy Letts. All playwrights who’ve cheerfully tucked their socks into their swamp boots and taken a flying leap into the nuptial morass of post-war coupledom.
But few playwrights have applied their scalpel to the subject of married life with such precision, and with so little anesthetic, as the late Edward Albee. Best known for his gloriously scalding 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — a three-hour spousal shouting match studded with a number of burning silences — “Seascape” is an altogether softer, funnier, more optimistic take on the chances of long-term romance. The play, Albee’s sixteenth, debuted on Broadway in 1975 and may be the only Pulitzer Prize-winning drama to include two giant talking reptiles, though I can’t be certain. In any event, the Allen Community College Theatre Department makes a marvel of this droll four-hander, squeezing from the script the precise quotient of humor and pathos, and excavating from the available material the perfect amount of mesmerizing weirdness.
THE SCENE is a deserted strip of beach somewhere in North America. Charlie and Nancy, a late middle-aged couple, freshly retired, find themselves at rest on an isolated dune, their toes dug into the sand, their ears full of the whispering sea, and their conversation tangled in anxieties about their future. Their children are grown, their hobbies are few. How, they wonder, will they spend the autumn of their lives?
But they are two temperaments at odds. Charlie (Austin Wickwire) wants to do nothing: “We’ve earned the rest,” he says more than once. Nancy (Lindsey Temaat), on the other hand, wants adventure, she wants romance, she wants to travel. A feeling of regret pervades her early speeches, a yearning for the unlived life, FOMO avant la lettre.
The couple has been married forever. Numbness is setting in, boredom beginning to encase the heart. Albee is at pains to interrogate what lies at the center of these airtight (occasionally airless) unions we form with another person: Can affection endure? What happens when the fun runs out? What do we do when all the fresh perfections we uncovered in our partner at the start of a relationship become nothing more than their familiar tics? At what point do we stop believing in the essential mystery of our lover? We may need our spouse — especially as we age — but do we still want them? The questions swirl.
But then, over the dunes, sidles another couple, Leslie and Sarah, who happen to be large, human-sized lizards that have only just crawled free of the rippling ocean and onto dry land, and now find themselves smack-dab in the middle of Charlie and Nancy’s desultory squabble.
Can we pause on the lizards for a second? Whether the credit goes to the play’s director, ACC theatre head Tony Piazza, or to the actors themselves — Judd Wiltse as Leslie, Carolyn Appleton as Sarah — the lizards are played with such bestial uncanniness that their initial entrance onto the stage seems to completely disorder the air in the room and shuffle the very molecules of the play at hand. This is not the night of theatre we had in mind. The transformation is thrilling.
After slithering furtively around the stage for a minute or two, we learn that the lizards speak proficient English, at which point “Seascape” becomes, primarily, a philosophic study in contrasts — lizard coupling versus human coupling. Although, as the play makes clear by the end, it’s the similarities between these two duos that proves the more illuminating.
“SEASCAPE’S” set-up is patently fantastical but the emotions are real, and it succeeds largely on the strength of its cast — Temaat, Wickwire, Appleton, and Wiltse — who never once betray the absurdity of the play’s premise but who remain bound throughout to the interior truths of their characters.
The Iola Community Theater is planning to stage a no doubt excellent production of Winnie-the-Pooh next month but, for now, ACC is giving the grown-ups a treat.
RG danley 