LOVE AMONG THE LIZARDS

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Local News

November 29, 2018 - 11:20 AM

Marriage is the fat on which the modern American theater has feasted for years. Tennessee Williams. William Inge. Eugene O’Neill. Neil Simon. Sam Shepard. Sarah Ruhl. Tracy Letts. All playwrights who’ve cheerfully tucked their socks into their swamp boots and taken a flying leap into the nuptial morass of post-war coupledom.

But few playwrights have applied their scalpel to the the subject of married life with such precision, and with so little anesthetic, as the late Edward Albee. Best known for his gloriously scalding 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, a three-hour spousal shouting match studded with a piquant number of burning silences, “Seascape” is an altogether softer, funnier, more optimistic take on the chances of long-term romance. The play, Albee’s sixteenth, debuted on Broadway in 1975, and may be the only Pulitzer Prize-winning drama to include two giant talking reptiles, though I can’t be certain. In any event, the Allen Community College Theatre Department makes a marvel of this droll four-hander, squeezing from the script the precise quotient of humor and pathos, and excavating from the available material the maximum amount of mesmerizing weirdness.

 

THE SCENE is a deserted strip of beach somewhere in North America. Charlie and Nancy, a late middle-aged couple, freshly retired, find themselves at rest on an isolated dune, their toes dug into the sand, their ears full of the whispering sea, and their conversation tangled in anxieties about their future. Their children are grown, their careers have ended. How then, they wonder, will they spend the autumn of their lives? They are two temperaments at odds. Charlie (Austin Wickwire) wants to do nothing: “We’ve earned the rest,” he says more than once. Nancy (Lindsey Temaat) wants adventure, she wants romance, she wants to travel. A feeling of regret pervades her early speeches, a yearning for the unlived life, FOMO avant la lettre.

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