TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT0049> <title> Oct 18, 1993: Who's Afraid Of Cincinnati? </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Oct. 18, 1993 What in The World Are We Doing? </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> THEATER, Page 97 Who's Afraid Of Cincinnati? </hdr> <body> Having given up on Broadway, Edward Albee may be forgotten, but he's not gone By WILLIAM A. HENRY III/CINCINNATI Mention his name to most theatergoers and you will elicit two responses: deep deep respect for what he did decades ago and mild astonishment that he isn't long gone. No one ever had a more spectacular Broadway debut than Edward Albee with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But that was in 1962. It's nearly 20 years since he had even a modest success--the 1975 talking-lizards fantasy Seascape, which won the Pulitzer Prize but ran just two months. For the past 10 years he has been unable to get anything produced on Broadway. Except to those who encounter him teaching in Houston, directing in Cincinnati or premiering a new play in Princeton, New Jersey, or Vienna, Albee is a voice of the past. That may be about to change. Last week the playwright was shuttling between the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, where he is staging the premiere of his newest work, Fragments, and Manhattan, where the off-Broadway Signature troupe is devoting its season to his works, including five never produced in New York City. Says Albee, revealing a hint of asperity toward critics who write him off as a has-been: "The company is doing pieces dating from 1960 to 1993. Let's see if there is any creative diminishment." Physically, Albee at 65 appears undiminished. His long dark hair is silvered, but his features are almost unlined. His every gesture mingles languorous confidence and explosive energy: he sprawls in soft upholstery, then coils upward with catlike ease and speed. He speaks confidently yet not obsessively about his works, which continue to emerge at a rate of nearly one a year. He insists he welcomes low-profile, low-budget circumstances, because they allow him enough control "to show audiences the play I heard and saw in my head when I was writing." Creatively, Albee is not so much diminished as doing what he always wanted--experimenting with form and content in ways that unnerve the mainstream. Off-Broadway is where he started his career--The Zoo Story and The American Dream all but invented off-Broadway--and he says his big mistake was aspiring to move on. "We misunderstood Broadway in the '60s," he says, "thinking it had matured. It's no place for a playwright. One serious play per season is tolerated. The rest is that stuff." He certainly wouldn't get close to Broadway with Fragments, which revisits some of the intellectual terrain of his last venture onto the Great White Way, 1983's The Man Who Had Three Arms. That outcry against pop and celebrity culture was shaped as an extended lecture by an actor standing in for the author. Fragments resembles dinner-party conversation among eight actors, the oldest and most central of whom, again, seemingly stands in for the author. There are no characters in the conventional sense and no plot, just opening and closing rounds of proverbs sandwiched around random reminiscences. The most substantial--a street hustler's recollection of being blackmailed, at 15, to abuse an even younger girl at the behest of her incest-driven father--has the same power to shock as the loss-of-innocence fables in American Dream and Virginia Woolf. But as soon as actor Michael J. Blankenship finishes wringing the full measure of poignance from it, he is mocked by the other actors into conceding, with a weak smile and a flip of the hand, that he made it up. Fragments is deliberately enigmatic, but it appears that Albee is meditating on mankind's preoccupation with storytelling and metaphor and the insistence on endowing tales with deep meaning--even when, as in the case of a proverb at the very end of the show, the words are literally nonsense. Structurally, Albee means to imitate classical chamber music; indeed, the play's subtitle is A Concerto Grosso. The actors repeat and expand on verbal phrases in the way that instrumentalists develop musical ones. While capably done, the idea makes for a somewhat stilted performance. The piece's satisfactions are more cerebral than emotional, in part because none of the eight actors except Blankenship and the sardonically funny Mack C. Miles can find the requisite mix of distance and conviction. Given better playing, the text holds many more laughs and mood shifts than it yet displays. Even now, it lingers and pricks the playgoer's memory more than most of the naturalistic melodramas it disdains. Marriage Play, the revised 1987 work that launches Albee's New York season, shares with Fragments an abstract fascination with language, including tics of repetition and of standing outside oneself to comment in the omniscient-observer tone of an old-fashioned novel. At its core, however, is a miniaturized Virginia Woolf, a 70-minute portrait of a long-term relationship that thrives on mockery and betrayal. This time there are only two characters, the husband and wife, and their bond is not merely battered but in apparent dissolution. Only a paralyzing sense of existential despair is keeping them together. The work is moving, and the production solid. But it is hard not to feel that Albee wrote this story better before. For any writer, the first challenge is to keep at it. If Albee is not rivaling Virginia Woolf in quality, neither is anyone else. And no one is testing more thoughtfully the possible bounds of the new. </body> </article> </text>