Club Bore

By * T.E. Kalem

Edward Albee almost seems to have lived through two careers, one very exciting, the other increasingly depressing. From The Zoo Story through The American Dream to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he displayed great gusto, waspish humor and feral power. In the succeeding nine years, he has foundered in murky metaphysics (Tiny Alice), dabbled in adaptations (The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) and gone down experimental blind alleys (Box-Mao-Box). Instead of lunging for the jugular, as he once did, Albee has cultivated a Jamesian languor in his prose, a fastidious dandyism of manner, a dusty, librarefied reserve. Portentousness of delivery is used to mask vacuity of thought. In his latest play, All Over, we instantly recognize him for what he now is --the club bore.

It is not that the play lacks grand themes. Its underlying concerns are death, love and the mutilation of love in the microcosm of the family. Some of the greatest plays of the Western world revolve around these subjects. But Albee has simply not given them any dramatic urgency or compelling emotional life. When All Over is not dead, it is dull, and mostly it is deadly dull. An unseen man is dying in a curtained-off area at the rear of the stage. Spread across the front and center are the people who have been closest to him during his lifetime. Each recites what role he or she filled in the life that is now emptying into nothingness.

So thin and sketchy are the characterizations that one or two stereotypical words serve to define and exhaust the nature of the people involved. First comes the dutiful wife (Jessica Tandy) with her 50-year badge of marital honor. Then there is the earthy, pleasure-giving mistress (Colleen Dewhurst), the sympathetic lawyer friend (George Voskovec), a hostile daughter (Madeleine Sherwood) and a remorse-laden son (lames Ray). Finally, there is a flip nurse (Betty Field) and the trusted family physician (Neil Fitzgerald), who has been something like a brother to the dying man. As the characters talk, a mounting pile of reportage --without even a grain of redeeming insight--gradually buries the audience.

These characters all seem to be trapped in an unlucky cocktail party that everyone senses is a dud evening. Their voices whine, wane and falter until the grim last line and title of the play reduces everyone to glum silence.

Apparently much impressed with Lindsay Anderson's mode of directing Home, John Gielgud has taken the same tack in staging All Over. But in Home, the broken-off dialogue, the short pauses, the long silences, filled the stage with the resonant, poignant music of life's approaching nighttime. In Albee's play, the air is filled only with unsaid nothings. If ever actors could save a script, these are the ones to do it. Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst, in particular, have and show the dramatic power, skill and sensitivity to raise Lazarus. But then Lazarus was the life of the party compared with AII Over.

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