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RÉKA CRISTIAN EDWARD ALBEE's CASTINGS Edward Albee's Plays

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RÉKA CRISTIAN EDWARD ALBEE's CASTINGS Edward Albee's Plays RÉKA CRISTIAN EDWARD ALBEE’S CASTINGS A delicate balance is a shading between lőve and haté that exists between anyhody wlio caresfor one another. (Edward Albee) Edward Albee’s plays—together with a long list of modern American dramatists—are indebted to the works of Eugene O’Neill. The birth of American tragedy starts with O’Neill’s dramatic art, which conveys humán alienation in the context of modern society, and sheds light on the tension that appears between humán essence and existence in the context of modern America. The American tragedy, in Péter Egri’s words was “brought about by the increased tension between the face and the reverse of the American Dream” 1 2. Post-war American drama depicts many facets of O’Neill’s trope of alienation. Among the best to describe the consumerist American Dream within the context of American drama was Edward Albee. His plays are, according to Péter Egri “grotesquely grim and bitterly playful pieces crossbreeding Realistic relevance with Absurdist insight”“- Edward Albee’s dramatis personae entails a construction specific to the name of the playwright. Albee’s dramas have a careful composition and a special Tendering of characters. Most of his characters are dual, in the sense that it is the couple, which is the basic unit in the playwright’s dramatic universe. The characters seem to act in couples, which consist of individuals that supplement each other in 1 Péter Egri “Critical Approaches to the Birth of Modern American Tragedy. The Significance of Eugene O’Neill”. In The Birth o f American Tragedy (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1988), 34. 2 Ibid., 34. 135 teliing, in dramatic action or in both. This supplementation, which is implied in the relational rhetoric of Albee’s dramaturgy, denotes that there is no specific hierarchy among the dramatic participants. The examples below aim to follow the similitude among Albee’s characters. The cast of Albee’s dramas participates in the process of encoding and unveiling the dramatic blindspot in Albee’s dramas, which is the figure of the present (or absent) child. This trope of the child is revealed in the emblematic dual constructions of the dramatic cast in Albee’s dramas. Albee’s characters contain, besides the dual component, a dispersed sense of the author in the characters’ journey through the oeuvre. The name of Edward Albee imprints the plays with characters that remind the reader of the biographical implications of the plays. The playwright claims this personal implication as a catharctic process: “I get all the characters in all of my plays out of my System by writing about them”3. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sandbox, Three Tall Women, The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance, The American Dream, Marriage Play, Couníing the Ways, Finding the Sun are somé of Albee’s plays centered around the issue of the lőve and haté that sublimate intő dramatic filiation acts. In the following the discussion will be based on mostly on The Zoo Story, A Delicate Balance, The American Dream, Marriage Play, Counting the Ways, F inding the Sun, with re ferences to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Play About the Baby, and somé remarks about Three Tall Women and Sandbox4. 3 Mel Gussow Edward Albee: A Singular Journey. A Biography (London: Oberon, 1999), 354. " ’ " 4 There are two Albee plays that are the closest to his biography. One is The Sandbox, a “cameo tribule to his maternal grandmother, who was closest to him” and Three Tall Women, “an act of peacemaking” with his adoptive molher, Frances (Frankié) Albee. The scene of the second act in Three Tall Women that always moves the playwright is when “the són, Albee’s surrogate, comes onstage and sits by the bedside of his mother”. Three Tall Women is the drama of Albees’ replicas. The character A (and her unnamed husband, who likes only tall women) explicitiy stands fór Frances (Frankié) Aj^ee, while the són of A bcars nőt only the trademark of the playwright bút highly identifies with him. There is a special monologue in the play, which is uttercd by another character, B, who is in fact a younger version of the character A. The character of B recalls an episode of lovemaking, which she had with a groom in a stable stall, an affair that her són (the Young Mán) discovered. The indirect, metonymical reference to A/Frankie is 136 The child (són) is the major theme that the playwright presents in his dramas. Albee’s 1997 drama culminates in this regard and it is entitled he Play About the Baby5. In the same context of filiation the made clear, since Frankié was a horsewoman and Albee said that this scene was his literary wish fulfillment The silent Young Mán of the play is described by the character C. She is the contempiative character of the drama and the younger version of the characters of B and A,. In acl two C describes the Young Mán as “how nice, how handsome, how very...’\ The sentence is nőt finished, nor the description finalized and the image of the Young Mán ends in silence. A (and B) cannot forgive the Young Mán. They are hostile towards him because of his homosexuality, a way of loving which they could never accept, and, accordingly tabooed the subject. A proof of the banished topic of homosexuality is the repressed figure of the Young Mán, who is a self-portrait of Albee in the play. He does nőt talk, in fact he does nőt utter a sound. His presencc is only physical nőt verbal. The figure of the Young Mán appcars alsó in The American Dream and in The Sandbox, as Teddy in A Delicate Balance, as Fergus in Finding the Sun, as YAM in FÁM and YAM. In Who \v Afraid of Virginia Woolf he is the enigmatic character, the fictional són of Martha and George. These love-hate games are encoded mostly by the relationship of the playwright with his mother and the maternal grandmother. The figure of Franees (Frankié) Albee is onc that praetically haunts all Albee’s plots. Present as the character of frankié Aj^ee in Three Táti Women, she is Mommy in The Sandbox and in The American Dream, Martha in Who ’s Afraid o f Virginia Woolf? and Ágnes in A Delicate Balance, the Wife in All Over, She in Counting the Ways, and Edmee in Finding the Sun. The most sympathetic character, however remains thal of Grandma, which appears in The American Dream and Sandbox. The Sandbox is Albee’s other memory play. It was written fór and about Edward Albee’s maternal Grandma Cotter, “his closest relatíve” with whom he formed a lasting and profound attachment. “A crotchety and very amusing woman”, she made Edward ‘s life easier and brighter by being as Mel Gussow describes her in the YAM chapter of the playwright’s biography, “a natural ally against his mother”. The estranged párénts did nőt teli Edward Albee of her death in 1959 so he missed her funeral. Later he melonymically transposed his personal good-bye intő a “brief play, in memory of my grandmother”. William Flanagan Edward Albee’s mentor and companion provided the play’s music fór this very personal farewell. The Young Mán (“good-looking, well built”) is converted intő the reál son-like Angel of Death that gives Grandma the final tender touch: “The Young Mán bends over, kisses Grandma gently on her forehead.” Edward Albee The Sandbox. The Death o f Bessie Smith (with FÁM and YAM) (New York: Signet, 1960), 20. Albee’s play entitled The Play About the Baby (1998) starts with a baby’s first cry in the wold. A young couple wants to take away the baby bút the Mán and the Woman (as the biological parents) try to convince the young couple that the baby never existed. Finally the blanketcd “baby bundle” was thrown intő the air. “The 137 play entitled Fám and Yam explicitly presents the not-yet named (name of the) author in the young character of YAM (the acronym fór The Young American Playwright), which renders a filial relationship with the character of FÁM (Famous American Playwright)6. The motif of the child (who is mostly gendered male) is recurring in different versions throughout the dramaturgy of Albee. The child constitutes the blindspot of the plays and it is hidden and revealed in the world of Albee’s verbal mastery. While the dual relationships in the dramas of Williams require a strong sense of the character’s gendered natúré, the characters from Seascape and Sandbox, the family of The American Dream, or Fám and Yam, and Fragments. A Sít Around—to name a few of Edward Albee’s dramatis personae—seem to distance their corporeality from their gendered bodies. In the context of Albee’s dramaturgy, sexuality seems of no greater importance than a simple dramatic device. Forster Hirsch remarks that Albee’s characters are “often removed from sex” and that “bodies in Albee are never, as they are in the work of Tennessee Williams, instruments nőt only of lust bút of salvation and spiritual transcendence as well”.7 Since the couple is the basic unit of Albee’s dramaturgy, it is the trope of the couples that will be in the focus of further investigations. The scope of this investigation is to visualize, through the couples in the dramas, the issue of the present or absent child as Albee’s plot of desire. The aim is alsó to present a patterning of events and characters by deriving the invisible intő the visible.
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