PLAYWRIGHT EDWARD ALBEE and Charles Darwin are coming head-to-head (or, more appropriately, head-to-gills) this year in the Broadway revival of Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Seascape, about the unusual meeting at the seaside of two couples of different species. (The Sandbox meets Zoo Story?) The playwright, who is often associated with absurdist existential dramas and blighted domsetic relationships, refers to Seascape as “an optimistic play, a rose play, as Jean Anouilh would have said.” (The revival is directed by Mark Lamos and opening at the Booth Theater.)
First produced four years after All Over (1971), a somber portrayal of the death of a family patriarch and its impact on the various survivors, Seascape can be viewed as a lighter, more optimistic version of the earlier play’s preoccupation with human mortality. While All Over ends with the utterance of those two words, Seascape, an autumnal fantasia on mortality, ends with the word “Begin.”
“When I write a play, I’m interested in changing the way people look at themselves and the way they look at life,” Albee explains. “The knowledge that you are going to die should present [an]intense awareness of life. People should be aware of all things, all times, experience the extremities of life, and fulfill themselves completely. Why does anyone want to go to sleep when the only thing left is to stay awake?”
At the time of this interview, Albee, who’s constantly on the move, whether supervising productions of his plays or teaching playwriting and creative writing at the University of Houston, was at home in his art-filled loft in New York City’s Tribeca district. He’s an avid collector of modern painting (Kandinsky, Lipshitz, Arp) and African sculpture, whose minimalist and Cubist lines reflect his own unique style of communication.
Michael Ehrhardt: You don’t mind if I tape our conversation, do you?
Edward Albee: Not at all. I once used an old fashioned tape machine to record a conversation with Louise Nevelson for research on a play about her. Even though I knew her, I wanted to get things down for later. I set the whole thing up, tested it at home, and put it down in front of her. She agreed to the recorder, and I carried on. She never touched the machine, but just sort of gestured over it. I recorded happily for about an hour and brought the machine home, only to find the tape was totally blank. That’s because Louise was a witch!
ME: Hopefully, I’ll have a little more luck. To begin, I know you’re back in town to oversee the new incarnation of Seascape.
EA: Right. I’ve been traveling a lot lately and it’s good to be back in a blue state. I try to avoid the red ones whenever I can.
ME: Your last play was about a man who falls in love with a goat. Seascape involves humans who are confronted by reptiles.
EA: Who decide to evolve. The reason I wrote Seascape is because I’m not convinced evolution has completely taken place.
ME: Might we actually be regressing, that the arc of evolution is in its decline? Are you on the side of the amphibian couple in the play? Are they superior to the humans?
EA: They lack certain basic human traits. They’re unaware of death and unaware of cruelty. They’re unaware of all the things that separate us from the other animals.
ME: So it’s our knowledge of our own mortality that is our saving grace?
EA: Nothing could be truer.
ME: Seascape was produced a few years after All Over, which dealt with mortality and its effect on those left behind, including sibling rivalry and a wife versus a mistress. It was a bitter pill for audiences to swallow. Some critics suggest that Seascape is a sweetened chaser to All Over. A sunnier play.
EA: Well, there is sun, yes.
ME: How is the production shaping up?
EA: Very well. The rehearsals are going splendidly. It’s a good cast: Frances Sternhagen and George Grizzard [the original Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf]play the human couple. The Booth is a good theater for it. Deborah Kerr was the wife, Nancy, in the original Seascape—and Barry Nelson was Charlie. Frank Langella and Maureen Anderman played the chameleon couple, Sarah and Leslie.
ME: You call them chameleons, but they’re really sort of sea dwellers, right?
EA: I suppose so.
ME: Even though Seascape won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, some critics found it perplexing or jejune, or just didn’t know what to say about it. How do you think they’ll react today?
EA: I won’t even guess.
ME: It will be more difficult for homophobic critics to accuse you of writing covert gay undertones in a play about reptiles.
EA: They’ve said things that were preposterous. The heterosexual critics have serious problems they don’t want to face.
ME: Phillip Roth referred to Tiny Alice, as “ghastly pansy rhetoric.” And George and Martha were accused of being a crypto-gay couple.
EA: Oh, yes. Poor John Gielgud (who played Julian in Tiny Alice); he was terrified of the part. He didn’t understand the play or his part in it.
ME: Considering how absurd current events are, maybe the public is more receptive to an absurdist or surreal slant in the theater today.
EA: That’s a very good possibility.
ME: Since you take a Darwinian perspective about the human race in Seascape, as an out gay man do you think there’s an evolutionary basis for why gays are treated with such hostility? Are straights hard-wired to be against us? Gore Vidal argues that we’re never given credit for not contributing to overpopulation.
EA: Right. You know Gore’s writing on sexuality is really very good. Gays are unique insofar as they see the world from the outsider’s dual perspective. That’s why they write so much more convincing female characters: we relate more. Look at Miller and Mamet. Their female characters hardly exist. But that’s part of the canard that Stanley Kaufman started about gay playwrights on Broadway. During the run of Malcolm I could never be sure if the critics were out to get me or James [Purdy].
ME: Williams, Inge, and Albee were supposed to be part of a homosexual cabal trying to take over the American theater.
EA: It’s really preposterous when critics base their reviews on sexuality. I make a point that there are gay writers who happen to be gay and write about it, and there are writers who just happen to be gay but don’t necessarily write about gay subjects.
ME: Such as a post-menopausal human heterosexual couple encountering a couple of ostensibly straight amphibians who’ve decided to evolve from out of the sea into the dry upper world? The setting of Seascape suggests the shore and dunes of Montauk Point. Did living out there inspire you?
EA: I suppose so. It’s still very idyllic out there. The Hamptons crowd hasn’t reached that far. It’s still mostly unspoiled that far out. I’ve got 4 acres I only paid $40,000 for in the 60’s. Of course, I have my writer’s foundation there, which keeps me busy.
ME: So you’re a mentor for young writers. Your mentor was Thornton Wilder. He’s such a theatre icon; what was he like?
EA: Wilder was wonderful, and very wise. He’s the one who advised me to give up poetry and take up playwriting.
ME: It’s ironic that the author of the all-American play that’s performed in high schools everywhere was gay.
EA: He was very introverted in that area and he felt he had to be back then. But I think The Skin of Our Teeth is a terrific play, and it had a big influence on me. It has some of the most inspired scenes in American theatre. And Our Town’s final scene still never fails to move me.
ME: What became of the Nijinsky movie you planned?
EA: Well, we were all set and Rudy Nureyev was ready to play the lead, with Paul Scofield as Diaghilev. Tony Richardson was going to direct—and then the money fell out. Rudy would have been perfect, except he was too intelligent.
ME: You also wrote an opera libretto for Bartelby the Scrivener. That’s unique.
EA: I wrote part of the libretto for William Flanagan, when the first writer dropped out.
ME: That must have been a special challenge, since Melville’s story doesn’t seem to scream out to be an opera. Of course, there is the constant refrain.
EA: “I would prefer not to.” I must admit it’s not a terribly active piece.
ME: Would you ever consider a libretto again?
EA: Not really. Everybody wants to do an opera of Who’s Afraid of Viriginia Woolf. I tell them I don’t want any cuts, and if you do it as an opera without cuts, it will be even longer than Parsifal, and almost as funny. Personally, I never pay attention to librettos, I only listen to the music. I listened to Cosí Fan Tutte for thirty years without a clue about the plot. And I didn’t miss a thing.
ME: Whatever happened to your Lorca play?
EA: I wasn’t happy with it. Too much pageantry. I did it in workshop at the University of Houston, so it hasn’t had an official performance. I don’t know if I’ll get back to it. Maybe I can fix it, I don’t know yet. I’m going to be participating in a symposium sponsored by PEN in a couple of weeks, in which I’ll be part of a panel (including Salman Rushdie) about the torture and killing of writers. I’ll be talking about the execution of Lorca and how brutally he was treated in the aftermath.
ME: You mean the Falangists’ infamous coup de grâce?
EA: Exactly. One guard taking a rifle and shooting him in the ass. That’s what conservative governments do to faggots. He was an intellectual, a leftist, a writer, and a faggot—what better reasons for killing somebody?
ME: He didn’t flee to Paris, like his friends Dalí and Buñuel.
EA: He was advised to, but he was too much of a mother’s boy.
ME: He was very conflicted, wasn’t he? Like a lot of Latin Roman Catholics.
EA: I don’t think he got laid as much as he should have. He did have male lovers. Toreadors and the like.
ME: Well, break a leg with Seascape!
EA: Thanks.
Michael Ehrhardt, a writer living in New York, is currently at work on “One Fine Day,” a play based on the “affaire Puccini,” and “The Baron of Arcadia,” a novel about Wilhelm von Gloeden.
