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Vol. LXII, No. 2
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Wednesday, January 9, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 2
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Wednesday, January 9, 2008
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Nodding more than once to the “shared shorthand” between them, playwright Edward Albee and McCarter Theatre director Emily Mann discussed theater past, present, and future in a special edition of the “McCarter Live at the Library” series last Thursday evening.
Speaking to a standing room-only crowd in the Princeton Public Library’s Community Room, the two theater veterans talked about how they met and have continued to collaborate over the years. Their latest shared venture, the world premiere of Mr. Albee’s play Me, Myself and I, opens at the McCarter on January 11 under the direction of Ms. Mann. (“When a pair of identical twin brothers are both named Otto,” asks the advertising copy for the play, “how’s a mother supposed to keep them straight?”)
Although critic Carol Rocamora was on hand to moderate the discussion, these two theater pros—Mr. Albee, in particular—easily held their own as reminiscences, one-liners, and some decidedly acerbic comments about the current state of Broadway were served forth to a mostly receptive audience.
Unfortunately, amplification problems occurred, perturbing the otherwise unflappable Mr. Albee and prompting an early exit of dozens of attendees crowding the library lobby in hopes of hearing the discussion.
Citing his many achievements and awards (he’s won three Pulitzer Prizes), Ms. Rocamora referred to the 80-year-old Mr. Albee as “the busiest young playwright this season” while the author of such well-known plays as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance shook his head at the idea of having been in the business for 50 years, insisting that it’s “too early” for lifetime achievement awards. Dressed in a casual sweater and dark shirt, the well-groomed playwright’s age was belied only by the hearing aids he wears in each ear.
Looking Back
The collegial relationship between Ms. Mann and Mr. Albee goes back some 25 years. Me, Myself and I will be the third Albee work directed by Ms. Mann. Of the first, she recalled visiting the playwright in his Harrison Street loft in New York City in 1992, where he held two plays in either hand. He gave her the one in his right hand; the one in the left turned out to be Three Tall Women, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The work in Mr. Albee’s right hand was Marriage Play, which the McCarter did indeed go on to produce that year under Ms. Mann’s direction, albeit with some displeasure on Mr. Albee’s part over the casting of the female lead. The better-known “name” producers insisted on getting to replace the perfectly able, but less familiar actress already cast in the role proved to be “a disaster,” according to Mr. Albee.
This market-driven aspect of the theater came in for a real pummeling on Thursday evening. When asked if he had seen the three new plays currently on Broadway, Mr. Albee said that he had not, but that he would be very surprised “if all three were worth the time and the trouble.” Citing “preposterous” production costs, he noted that playwrights today tend to “soften” and “commercialize” their work in an effort to get produced. As a result, he said, there is little in the way of exciting, challenging theater being offered. Ms. Mann concurred, noting that “Broadway has not been a fertile or forgiving place for young playwrights for a long time.”
Both agreed that the good news is that regional theater is alive and well, as evidenced by venues like the McCarter in Princeton and the Alley Theater in Houston. Not-for-profit enterprises in New York City also happily opt for “excellence” over “popularity,” offering “first-rate, tough experimental theater.” Don’t look for a great theatrical experience in Los Angeles, though: “I don’t think they train people in Los Angeles to do serious plays,” said Mr. Albee at one point.
Influences
Mr. Albee claims the playwrights Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett as major influences on his writing and directing. Beckett is a particular favorite (“one of the simplest, clearest, funniest, and most profound playwrights of the 20th century”), and Mr. Albee told an amusing story about having had the temerity to change one of Beckett’s stage directions in a production of Krapp’s Last Tape he was directing. It was only after experiencing considerable anxiety about having committed this dastardly deed that Mr. Albee was reassured — by a distinguished Beckett scholar, no less — that Beckett himself had made the same change in an earlier production.
Ms. Mann and Mr. Albee returned several times to their shared experience of being both writers and directors in the theater, and, particularly, of the pleasures of working with each other. Mr. Albee lauded Ms. Mann’s casting ability and Ms. Mann talked about the joys of directing an Albee play, noting that his scripts are like musical scores. “The punctuation is as important as the words,” she observed. “It gives you rhythm, it gives you action.” In 1993 she directed the McCarter production of All Over, starring Rosemary Harris and Michael Learned. Her own play, Mrs. Packard, reflected, she said, the line-by-line style of Albee’s writing.
Although being both a playwright and a director would seem to be a perfectly logical combination, it requires great objectivity about one’s own work and not everyone, noted Albee, should attempt it. “Tennessee [Williams] shouldn’t have even been allowed into rehearsals,” he complained (presumably recalling the 1947 premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire), observing that Williams unfortunately ceded to many of the “commercializing” changes in his script made by director Elia Kazan.
One of Williams’s southern compatriots, the novelist Carson McCullers, was the centerpiece of another Albee anecdote. When Mr. Albee adapted Ms. McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café for the stage, a critic dismissed his effort by saying that he had simply transcribed Ms. McCullers’s dialogue. The original book, as it turned out, had had absolutely no dialogue in it.
While Ms. Mann allowed that playwrighting is a somewhat time-consuming process for her, Mr. Albee has an almost mystical take on his vocation. After blithely offering a one-word answer to the question of where he got his inspiration for Me, Myself, and I (“Schenectady”), he went on to say that as a “playwright” he “writes plays,” and doesn’t need inspiration. He works quickly (he wrote Zoo Story in three weeks), and suggested that his plays seem to write themselves.
One of the ironies of Me, Myself and I, Mr. Albee noted, is that although it is, for the most part, a very funny play, he wrote it during one of the saddest times of his life, just before and after his partner of 35 years passed away. “Isn’t it interesting that I wrote a play like this at a time like that?” he asked. “You’ll find out when you see it how bizarre that is.”