You Can Lead an Audience to the Theater, But You Can't Make It Think

I picked up a copy of Conversations with Edward Albee (Mississippi, 1988) at the library book sale the other day. I love reading collections of interviews, and Albee has been one of my favorite playwrights since I started reading him in my sophomore year of high school, almost fifty years ago. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is virtually burned into my brainpaths.

To be honest, though, I've neglected Albee's work for about the past decade. One happy result of reading this collection of conversations is that I checked out the third volume of his collected plays, most of which I haven't read yet.

The early interviews in the book, especially, took me back. I was greatly influenced for a while by Albee's pronouncements on critics and literature, though they seem simple-minded to me now. For example:

What I said is that I thought it was not valid for a critic to criticize a play for its matter rather than its manner -- that what was constituted then was a type of censorship ... You may dislike the intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must not be based on your view of what it's about. The work of art must be judged by how well it succeeds in its intention [60].

This sort of thing impressed me when I was seventeen. Now I think it's absurd, because I don't think the "manner" can be separated from the "matter" of a work of art. (I noticed too that on a couple of occasions Albee expressed extreme dislike for the popular comedies of Neil Simon, but because of their matter instead of their manner: he grants that Simon "writes the kind of play he writes very expertly indeed" [82]; by Albee's stated criteria, that should mean that Simon's art is valid, but he doesn't seem to think so.) The reason why criticism is so hard to do well is that the critic must deal with both subject and execution -- as must the artist. But what I also see now is that the "critics" (actually newspaper and newsmagazine reviewers) who bedeviled Albee and other writers were just really bad critics, neither very knowledgeable about drama or any other art nor very intelligent on any level. They were also gatekeepers of a kind, writing for a male audience they presumed to be much like themselves.

Consider the claim, which I've often encountered over the years, that Virginia Woolf was "really" about two gay couples rather than two heterosexual married couples. Even Leslie Fiedler, who really should have known better, bought into it. It turns up in Conversations in a 1966 Paris Review interview of Albee by his former "roommate," the composer William Flanagan. As Albee said, "Only the most callow or insecure or downright stupid critic would fault Proust's work, for example, for the transposition that he made of characters' sexes" [53].

What must have been running through their minds when they discussed this question? They knew very well that they were both queer, but such a fact couldn't be acknowledged in print at that time unless you were Robert Duncan or Allen Ginsberg. (And it was irrelevant anyhow.) But in this post-2000 conversation for PBS's In the Life between Albee and Kathleen Turner, who played Martha in the 2005 Broadway revival of Virginia Woolf?, Albee says simply what was surely the main factor: homophobic critics tried to smear the play by fag-baiting the playwright, and claiming that it was really about homosexuals and therefore lacked True Universality. (This sort of thing is still with us, often involving the same offenders. And nowadays some gay critics agree that Williams, Albee, and others wrote coded homosexual works that should be retroactively de-closeted; I don't think that's an improvement.)

In a couple of the interviews, Albee contrasts his work with socially conscious plays of the 1930s, and deploys the quip that if you want art to contain a message, send a telegram. At the same time, his work was avowedly a critique of modern American society; he insisted that an artist should make the audience uncomfortable, should make them think about their lives, and so on. While I admit that this is not quite the same thing as the overt preaching of Proletarian Art, I still think it's a message. I just don't think a message is a bad thing. As Joanna Russ argued,

it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "Political". Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above" politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social institutions, and received ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist. Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction bears any relations to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought) then the human (including social and political) truth of a piece of fiction matters for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political [originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979, 103; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 165].

Even when I was younger I noticed that Albee was, if not preachy, at least grinding an ax. And now it looks as though he imported some of his beliefs into his work more overtly than I'd thought. George makes some remarks about "evolution" in Virginia Woolf that I naively took for the character's opinions, not his author's. (Just as I hoped George's equation of contraception with murder wasn't Albee's opinion.) But in a 1975 interview Albee says of his play Seascape, in which a suburban married couple encounter a lizard married couple from under the ocean:

... The play is about whether or not evolution has taken place. Sometimes I've got my doubts.

Jeanne Wolf: You're not sure if we're growing?

Edward Albee: I don't share the view that we're on the way up, anyway.

Jeanne Wolf: What would be the way up? Where should we go?

Edward Albee: I don't know, but the whole assumption that we're at the top of the pile just because we're the most recent animal strikes me as being a fallacious assumption. I thnk we're making sort of a mess of it. Maybe we'll stop being one of the two or three animals that kills its own kind, for example. We're the only animal that is polluting the atmosphere so that it can't survive anymore. No other animal does that. And this can't be high intelligence that creates global suicide.

Jeanne Wolf: Is it your intention then to call our attention to this predicament?

Edward Albee: In this play I'm certainly concerned with whether or not we shouldn't look to see whether as splendid as we think we are and if we don't have something to learn from our theoretical inferiors [117].

When Albee expresses "doubts" about whether "evolution has taken place," he doesn't seem to mean that he doubts that species change by natural selection, but that human beings have climbed higher on the Great Chain of Being -- which is not part of Darwin's theory. It's not easy to tell in this passage what are Albee's beliefs about evolution and what he's attributing to other people. Like many educated lay believers in Evolution, though, Albee was a Spencerian here, not a Darwinian. In any case, he definitely talks as though he meant Seascape to have a message, albeit more tastefully and subtly expressed than the vulgar Commercial Theater would dictate.

And oh yes, the Commercial Theater. Certainly Albee's right about the problem posed by Broadway's dominance, and about the way that huge production budgets adversely affect the quality of the shows. It seems obvious to me that, as with corporate media generally, the answer is to quit conceding that Broadway, or New York City, is American theater. Part of the problem is the nature of theater itself: a film can be distributed and shown widely, and every audience will see the same film. Theater is an inevitably local and transient phenomenon because of the very qualities Albee rightly stresses: every performance is unique, and it takes place in the presence of the audience, with the cast right in front of them instead of projected on a screen. (Performances can be recorded on video, of course, but that's not the same as live theater either.) The remedy is more theater everywhere, and that seems to be happening, if not enough. Albee himself has used his prominence to promote theater outside of the Broadway system, and he deserves great credit for that.

And my word, he's 83 now, still writing, still working. Which reminds me of something that I noticed while skimming over Virginia Woolf today. George and Martha often tease each other in the play about their respective ages -- George is 46, Martha 52 -- and at one point Martha refers to the 30s musical Chicago, "starring Little Miss Alice Faye." George says mockingly, "Well, that was before my time..." But think about it: the play was originally produced in 1962, so think of it as taking place in 1960. George would have been born around 1914, Martha in 1908. Both of them could easily have seen Chicago in its first run. The past is rushing away very fast.

The Great Work Begins

Usually, when I read something 'shocking' from a century or more ago, it's hard to see how it could have shocked anyone -- think of Beethoven's 'dissonant' late quartets, or try to imagine how a man could have been excited by the sight of a woman's ankle when skirts trailed the ground. Occasionally something still works. Mrs Warren's Profession, for instance, still strains against male limits on women, and Bernard Shaw's work in general goes places where drama hesitates a century later. (I think this may be one reason some people try to dismiss his work. Yes, he was a very conscious dramatist, jerry-rigging his structures and effects as methodically as a carpenter, but even his lighter work often has a visceral undertow.)

Then there's a play like Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf, from 1894. (Beware: Here There Be Spoylers, though it's hard to believe that anyone could care about one of Ibsen's more obscure works after 114 years.) Eva LeGallienne, whose translation I read, commented in her introduction that the play was avant-garde in its day. I can see that, for reasons I'll try to explain, but I can also see how it plays Chicken with themes that avant-garde theatre would later glory in, and I wonder what Ibsen would have done with more freedom to pursue those themes.

Little Eyolf is the name of a crippled little boy, the son of a Man of Letters and his sensual, neglected wife. Eyolf was injured as an infant, and now limps around the scenery on a crutch like Tiny Tim (or perhaps Little Lord Fauntleroy, as he later makes an entrance in what seems to be a major Foofy Outfit). His father has just returned from a rest cure in the mountains, in hopes of recovering the strength to write his masterpiece On Responsibility. Also present is his father's younger half-sister Asta. The tense family reunion is disrupted by a visit by the old Rat Woman, a Pied Piper figure who enchants rats and other crawly things into the sea, where they drown. Allmers, the father, wants to bond with his son after neglecting him for his Great Work, to the fury of his wife Rita, who doesn't want to share Allmers even with their child.

Unsurprisingly, Eyolf in his Foofy Suit follows the Rat Woman into the icy fjord and drowns; only his crutch is recovered. As Allmers sits mourning with Asta, they reminisce how, as poor orphans, they had pretended that Asta was a boy named Eyolf, to the point that Asta wore her brother's hand-me-down clothes. We learn that Allmers had shared this memory with only one outsider: his wife Rita. Asta reveals that they are not really even half-siblings, for Allmers's father, who had married Asta's mother, was not in fact her father. It seems that Allmers and Asta may run off together, since their love will no longer be incestuous, but Ibsen stops just short of this scandalous suggestion. I was half-hoping that Asta would turn out to be really a boy after all, and that they would still run away together, but of course that doesn't happen either. Then there is a great confrontation between Allmers and his wife, who plan to separate rather than live together with the ghost of their drowned son. Thus we learn another guilty secret:

ALLMERS (With sudden anger): You’re the one who’s guilty, Rita!
RITA (Rising): I!
ALLMERS: Yes, you! It was your fault that he became – what he was! It was your fault that he couldn’t save himself when he fell into the water!
RITA (As though warding off a blow): Alfred – I won’t have you lay the blame on me!
ALLMERS (More and more beside himself): But I do! You were to blame! It was due to your neglect; you left him lying on the table – unguarded, unprotected – a helpless infant!
RITA: He seemed perfectly safe; he was lying on the pillow fast asleep. And you’d promised to look after him.
ALLMERS: Yes, I had. (Lowers his voice.) But you came and lured me away from him; enticed me into going with you.
RITA (Looks at him defiantly): And you forgot the child, and everything else – why not admit it?
ALLMERS: (With suppressed rage): It’s true. (In a lower tone) I forgot him – in your arms!
RITA (Outraged): This is intolerable of you, Alfred!
ALLMERS (In a low voice, shaking his clenched fists in her face): So, you see, it was you who sent little Eyolf to his death.
RITA (Wildly) It was as much your fault as mine – if what you say is true!
ALLMERS: Yes – you have every right to accuse me. We were both guilty – both of us – Eyolf’s death was a kind of retribution, after all.
RITA: Retribution?
ALLMERS (With more self-control): It was a judgment on us both. We have been justly punished. I suppose that’s why we shrank from him while he was still alive; we were tormented by a secret shame – a cowardly sense of remorse. We couldn’t bear to see him dragging himself about on that – that thing –
RITA (In a whisper): The crutch.
ALLMERS: Yes. And what we call our grief, is nothing but the pangs of conscience, Rita. Nothing else.
RITA (Gazes at him helplessly) : We shall be driven to despair – driven into madness. There’s no possible way that we can ever make amends.

Yes -- Little Eyolf was crippled because his mother seduced his father, and they were married at the time! This is beyond kink; it seems more Theatre of the Ridiculous.

It didn't help that as I was reading the passage quoted above, I was also peeking from one corner of my eye at this satirical video from the Onion, which made the whole thing seem like a parody of 19th century Sturm und Drang -- despite Shaw's adulation of Ibsen, it felt like the sort of drama he mocked in his plays. In fact, it felt Wildean: one would need a heart of stone to read about Eyolf dragging himself around on that -- that thing -- without laughing. With incest, gender-bending, primal-scene trauma, and infanticide (Eyolf's death is the fulfilment of Rita's wish not to share Allmers with him, though she does nothing overt to bring it about) peeking out through the cracks, Little Eyolf almost bursts the limits of melodrama into camp, at least from the perspective of a century later.