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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Seascape: Speakin' Lizards!
By Harry Haun
22 Nov 2005
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Edward Albee; Michael Yeargan; George Grizzard; Frances Sternhagen; Frederick Weller; Elizabeth Marvel; Andre Bishop; A.R. Gurney Jr.; Catherine Zuber; Marian Seldes; Charles Durning; Martha Clarke.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Two tiny pools of light streamed lazar-like from the man in the back of the Booth to the theatre's stage Nov. 21. These were Edward Albee's eyeglasses reflecting Edward Albee's Seascape which, as brightly lit by Peter Kaczorowski and handsomely designed by Michael Yeargan, drew applause and gasps of delight from first-nighters as the curtain went up.
Just like the old days. The veteran campaigner, now 77 and three deep in Pulitzers (his questioning masterpieces—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?—pointedly not being among them), had assumed his time-honored battlestation at the rear of the house. The SRO lane had been cleared so a dramatist could pace in peace— even Albee, who is as senior and as prestigious as American playwrights come these days.
In contrast to the domestic dust-ups created by Woolf and Goat, this first Broadway revival of his second Pulitzer Prize-winning play is truly-madly-deeply a day at the beach—from the pastel look of it, a rolling dune off Nantucket full of sand, driftwood and intellectual debate. It's here that two couples square off for some ideological volleyball.
The older pair is human and retired (George Grizzard and Frances Sternhagen); the younger is reptilian and evolving (Frederick Weller and Elizabeth Marvel)—lizards to be exact. But this doesn't prevent them from batting it back and forth. The language that passes between species is both oblique and obvious, edging toward an Albee abyss.
The author drank in all this theatricality in a single standing, arms folded, chin fixed. His intensity was practically palpable, but it was discernably diminished at the after-party at Tavern of the Green, whose white clapboard suggested Nantucket's wicker wonderland.
"It was a good reaction tonight," he conceded, weighing his words carefully. "I didn't like tonight's performance as well as some others I've seen. Everybody pushes too hard."
Only two words have been added to the play, and they are in the title. (It was originally just Seascape, but, in the day of Oprah, the marketing people insisted his name be part of the title.) Otherwise, the play is exactly as he wrote it, word for word, pause for pause. He is not tempted to rewrite plays, as Neil Simon is wont to do. "Oh, does he redo?" Albee asked, surprised, his eyebrow arching a bit. "I can't tell with his work." A mischievous smile may or may not have been playing at his lips, but he seemed pleased with the retort.
Does he think the piece has improved with age in the 30 years since Barry Nelson, Deborah Kerr, Frank Langella and Maureen Anderman first delivered it to Broadway and the work made the Tony running for Best Play? "I don't know. It's not for me to say."
(Critics who did say thought it clearer, more accessible "gentle Albee" and that casting the humans older than before gave the play extra resonance and poignancy.)
Now on Albee's drawing board are two new plays—"I don't like to talk about them. I could be wrong about them."—but there is movement on Peter and Jerry, the umbrella title of two one-acts, Homelife and the landmark play that launched his career in 1958, The Zoo Story, about two strangers who meet in Central Park. The recently written Homelife constitutes the first act and concerns one of the men and his wife a few hours before The Zoo Story. "It's not a prequel. It's another play. Put the two of them together, and it's a longer evening. I think that we're doing them in London in the fall, then bringing them into New York."
Weller, who co-starred with Frank Wood and Johanna Day when Peter and Jerry world-premiered at Hartford Stage in May of 2004, is the logical choice (on several counts) to be a green, cold-blooded quadruped in Seascape, being fresh from the Glengarry Glen Ross shark tank. "It has been amazing to work with this cast after that cast," he said. "Now, I can say I only do Pulitzer Prize plays—and Take Me Out, the Richard Greenberg play that I did before Glengarry, was nominated for a Pulitzer."
His next acting assignment will be opposite his wife, Ali Marsh, and is authored by another Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Beth Henley—Ridiculous Fraud, which he will do in May-June at the McCarter Theatre, co-starring Reg Rogers and Daniel London. "We workshopped it at the Sundance Theatre Lab last summer," he said. "It's about a family in New Orleans, which is where I'm from." His kin survived Katrina—but with bad bruises.
Although his Leslie the lizard professes to hate fish, Weller the actor harbored no such compunctions at the Tavern buffet table. "I studied a garden variety lizard, which I found very helpful in getting into this role. I watched this lizard that was on our balcony in South Carolina when we were on vacation. He kept coming on to the balcony, and I would just sit and watch him move. He went through all the lizard moves for me."
The hardest thing about this role for him was its elasticity. "There's a lot of room for interpretation. The character has grown incredibly since the first day of rehearsal."
At least his first day of rehearsal was happier than Langella's. The play was originally three acts, and Langella signed up because of the compelling second act, which took place underwater and focused on the girl and boy lizards. But, on the first day, Albee blithely announced Act II had been dropped in its entirely and the play would only be two acts. Langella made do with what was left and won the Tony as 1975's Best Featured Actor.
Albee, who also directed that production and therefore was in the position of playing God, giving and taking away, still defends this startling job of editing. "It's hard to explain, or even remember, it now. All four of them were down there underwater, but it's too complicated to go into. I thought it was better just to eliminate it. If it had been necessary, I wouldn't have been able to cut it so easily. It still exists. It's probably in The Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library, but it can't be performed."
Marvel—who more often than not is one regardless of the role—was also a right-on choice for Leslie the lizard's vis-a-vis, Sarah. "I learned a lot from doing this role, and I'm still learning," she said. "It's a beautiful and unusual thing to be asked to play something other than a human being. What I've found is I have to empty my mind before the show and get to a place of no expectation, no anxiety, no presumption—just be open and curious. Everything is new I'm experiencing on stage. Everything—except my husband, Leslie." Continued...
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