Albee-Palooza!!!!
By Johnnie Walker
Issue date: 11/17/05 Section: Arts and Culture
What's with Edward Albee these days? For the past couple of weeks, it's seemed almost impossible to see a play in this city not written by the seminal American playwright. This is a good thing. Albee, in a potential tie with Tennessee Williams, is the best American playwright of our time, and it's time we started to realize it. It's never hard to find a production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Zoo Story being produced by some classical rep company or in the University auditorium, but I'm really excited to see people looking at some of his lesser known works around the city. From VCDS' Everything in the Garden that ran last week, to the CanStage's just-opened The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, to the Alumnae Theatre's Three Tall Women, to the upcoming production of A Delicate Balance coming to Robert Gill next month, people are starting to explore the Albee plays that don't have Elizabeth Taylor movies or audition pieces.
The problem with having two of your earliest plays happen to be two of the best pieces of 20th century theatre is that people have rather high expectations, and for quite a while after Zoo and Woolf, Albee could not get much in the way of audiences or good reviews. But if people would take a look at these later plays, they would say that the same essential Albeeness that makes those plays so exciting, chilling and powerful is instilled in about every one of his works. There's definitely a structure to The Albee Play. We start off with some light-hearted comedy that always has a bit of a nasty streak, and move so gradually into harrowing drama that we don't know what hit us until we see the bruise. And there's always a bruise. In a manner way less heavy-handed than the didacticism of authors like Brecht, Albee constantly forces his audiences to not be merely entertained, but to ask themselves questions about their own lives. Head down to Alumnae Theatre's Three Tall Women and you'll see what I mean.
I might as well start with the Vic show. VCDS' production Everything in the Garden was an entertaining, if decidedly student, production. When I was looking through the program before the light's went down it read like a veritable Who's Who of campus theatre. Diana Bentley was charming as the Mary Poppins-esque brothel madam Mrs. Toothe, and Catherine Dunn did some great work as the central character Jenny. But the stand-out performance was Matt McGeachy who gave a terrific turn as Richard, the man who discovers his wife picked up her "extra money" by becoming a suburban whore. Thing is, Garden is definitely one of Albee's weaker scripts, and although we can see where he's attempting to throw in the climactic emotional gut-punch, it just doesn't quite deliver in this play.
The problem with having two of your earliest plays happen to be two of the best pieces of 20th century theatre is that people have rather high expectations, and for quite a while after Zoo and Woolf, Albee could not get much in the way of audiences or good reviews. But if people would take a look at these later plays, they would say that the same essential Albeeness that makes those plays so exciting, chilling and powerful is instilled in about every one of his works. There's definitely a structure to The Albee Play. We start off with some light-hearted comedy that always has a bit of a nasty streak, and move so gradually into harrowing drama that we don't know what hit us until we see the bruise. And there's always a bruise. In a manner way less heavy-handed than the didacticism of authors like Brecht, Albee constantly forces his audiences to not be merely entertained, but to ask themselves questions about their own lives. Head down to Alumnae Theatre's Three Tall Women and you'll see what I mean.
I might as well start with the Vic show. VCDS' production Everything in the Garden was an entertaining, if decidedly student, production. When I was looking through the program before the light's went down it read like a veritable Who's Who of campus theatre. Diana Bentley was charming as the Mary Poppins-esque brothel madam Mrs. Toothe, and Catherine Dunn did some great work as the central character Jenny. But the stand-out performance was Matt McGeachy who gave a terrific turn as Richard, the man who discovers his wife picked up her "extra money" by becoming a suburban whore. Thing is, Garden is definitely one of Albee's weaker scripts, and although we can see where he's attempting to throw in the climactic emotional gut-punch, it just doesn't quite deliver in this play.
