30 PLAYS IN 30 DAYS: Play # 5 "All Over" by Edward Albee

 

I have decided for the month of September to read 30 plays in 30 days. It is my belief that, if possible, a play should be read in one sitting to get a better inherent sense of the dramatic arc. Each day, I will write a short post here about the play of the day.

Play #5

All Over by Edward Albee

Despite the huge success of the playwright's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, both on Broadway and in Mike Nichols first feature film as a director, and the Pulitzer Prize he won for A Delicate Balance in 1966, Edward Albee's All Over was torn to pieces by many critics and closed after only 40 performances on Broadway in 1971. This despite Albee's (in my opinion, much-deserved) renown, and a powerhouse team, including Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst in leading roles, and John Gielgud at the helm of the production.  The play fared better a year later with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production in London, a production which featured Angela Landsbury. Clive Barnes, who felt Woolf was overpraised and considered All Over to be Albee's most important work to date, wrote, "It is a moving meditation and threnody on death--- and there indeed is the rub. One could hardly expect such a subject to be popular on Broadway, nor did it prove so.... the notices were almost gleefully savage, pointing out the work's melancholy and mood, the special musical tonality of its texture, and its slowness, without catching its poetry and subdued passion, its operatic grace, and careful construction, its beautiful writing, and, most of all, its grave and noble sense of man's mortality." Barnes concluded: "Perhaps people do not wish to be assured that they too will one day die."

While I do not find All Over to be my favorite of Albee's early work--- I am incredibly fond of Zoo Story, the Ionesco-inspired American Dream, and yes, I am captivated by the energy in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--- I do agree that All Over has a great deal of beauty in its writing, and find it puzzling that it failed so terribly here in the states. Yes, it is slow--- Albee uses variations of the word "languid" more than once in describing a character's demeanor--- but it is not without precision and passion, as Mr. Barnes notes. 

It is literally a deathbed play. An unnamed "great" man (or at least mildly famous, as the press awaits on the property for word of his death) lays dying, while being cared for by a Doctor in his 80s and a Nurse. In wait are the man's Wife, his Mistress, his Son and his Daughter, and his Best Friend, who is also the family lawyer (none of the characters are given names, only these titles in relationship to the dying man). The Wife seems closer with, and more fond of, the Mistress than her own grown children. Indeed, she is disgusted by her Son (though I find him to be the most likeable of the characters, but perhaps that says more about me) for showing too much emotion at times, and the Daughter and Mother wage an all-out war of words and emotions against one another for much of the play. 

I believe Albee to a lyrical and wondrous writer, and there are many speeches that do not disappoint. Perhaps though, it is the number of ponderous monologues delivered that kept U.S. audiences from completely tuning in, as well as the inability to find a completely consistent tone between family drama and Theatre of the Absurd. Albee once said that his three favorite playwrights were Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugene Ionesco (in that order), and this play feels Pinter inspired in some ways--- it has no fear of pauses and silence--- and that can be disconcerting for many audiences. 

I dig this play and its language, but at times find it has a "trying too hard" quality for me. Perhaps this is something I ought not be critical of, but I am. I also find that, unlike Zoo Story, Virginia Woolf, or a later work like Three Tall Women, the speeches, while still well-written, seem to run out of energy. Perhaps this was by design, but it doesn't change the fact that, at least on the page, some feel a bit overlong and tedious by the end of them. 

But only a bit. This is still great writing, folks, and I would be more than happy to catch a production of it some day. But then, I have never hidden the fact that I am an Albee fanboy in many ways, as it was early viewings of readings of some of his plays that first made me see what theater could be capable of that not even movies can achieve. So I will always presume that even when I find problems in his plays, some of them may very well be my own.