'Seascape': Albee At His Uncanniest
'Seascape': Albee at his uncanniest
By CHRISTOPHER POTTER
NEWS ARTS WRITER APR 17 1994
PREVIEW
In Edward Albee’s "Seascape,” a recently-retired, vacationing couple go picnicking on an isolated, rocky ocean beach.
The setting is idyllic, yet there’s palpable friction. Husband Charlie is happy to simply veg out in his senior years: “We’ve earned a little rest.” On the other hand, wife Nancy is eager to do all the things she never did during child-rearing and home-making: “We’ve earned a little life.”
The two bicker sometimes lightly, sometimes angrily about what constitutes a rewarding existence. Suddenly Charlie, sensing something behind him, turns and gasps - as two long-tailed, reptilian creatures gaze down from the rocks above.
“Ohmygod!” is all he can gulp.
Abruptly “Seascape” mutates into science-fiction fantasy. Or is it “a true comedy of manners,” as one critic put it?
“If we’d gotten John Williams, he could have written some appropriate lizard music,” laughs Larry Rusinsky, whose production of “Seascape” opens Thursday at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre.
In fact, “Seascape’s” monsters from the deep prove unexpectedly civilized critters. Named Leslie and Sarah (and played by R. Brian Falkner and Wendy Wright), they’re emotionally almost mirror images of Charley and Nancy (played by Charles Sutherland and Patricia Rector), speak English and feel comparably lost and discontent.
“Seascape” garnered Albee a Pulitzer Prize (He just won his third this week for the play “Three Tall Women”). Yet the show remains wide open to various psychological, philosophical and biological interpretations even two decades later. “It is a puzzle,” admits director Rusinsky. “Obviously we’ve got lizards coming up out of the sea, but the play’s certainly much more than that.”
“My take on it is that it’s an allegory involving the personal evolution of one individual, in which the different characters represent different aspects of the personality. I think it’s meant to be a re-unification of the conscious with the subconscious, with deep stuff we may not have known was inside us. When you read it from that perspective, a lot of it comes together.
“There’s Leslie’s animal nature and animal instincts, and Charlie’s intellectual rationality. Nancy is sort of the emotional pleasure principle.” Yet Rusinsky stresses that even without allusions, "The show is so well written you can simply enjoy the story itself, regardless of interior meanings.”
Rusinsky would like “Seascape” not to come off as somehow cartoonish. "It’s inevitable that when you talk about these creatures, a lot of people are going to say, ‘Oh yeah, the show’s got a couple of sea monsters in it.’ There’s the obvious connotations to Godzilla or The Creature From the Black Lagoon.
“Since we don’t have a New York budget, I think any attempt to make Leslie and Sarah look ultra-reptilian would fail, short of putting real lizards out there. But we’re trying to avoid cartoon aspects. We don’t want to force an actor to crawl around on all fours for 45 minutes. so we’ve tried to go for lizardness without being blatant about it.”
Wendy Wright, R. Brian Falkner in Ann Arbor Civic Theatre production of Edward Albee's surreal comic-drama 'Seascape.'
Actors Wright and Falkner have been rehearsing while wearing “rehearsal tails, just so they’d get used to them. There’s a fine line between how lizardish and how humanish they are. We’re trying for something in between.
Albee originally penned a third act for “Seascape,” involving an undersea adventure that included doing battle with a giant octopus. Rusinsky says he’s glad the playwright dropped the act before the play opened, because it would have detracted from the show’s emotional balance.
“Whatever happened in the second act would have simply been a prelude. And it really seems so touching and complete as it’s now written. Albee seems to say that we don’t need to go into some kind of oblivion where you’re sitting at the bottom of the ocean shutting out everything. There’s no need to reject life.”
Rusinsky hopes “Seascape” will be a show for all ages. “I think kids will epjoy watching the lizards, and maybe pick up a little philosophy on the side.”
"Seascape” will run Thursday through Saturday, April 21-23,25-27 and May 5-7 at Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s Old Friends Theatre, 2275 Platt Road. Curtain for all shows is 8 p.m. Thursday night is Two-for-One Night. For details and reservations call 971-2228.