I didn't realize before why Albee is my favorite playwright - even though I saw his "The Play About The Baby" and my all time favorite film is "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" - according to this interview he wonders if he is a womb twin survivor!
Here's a review of his newest play now on in NYC called "Me, Myself and I"
A rare example of how womb twin survivors are becoming a known part of our culture.
Enjoy,
Monica
An evening of minor Albee, and minor menace
Preston Sadleir and Natalya Payne. Photo by Joan Marcus.
By Mark Sullivan
1:31 pm Sep. 14, 2010 | Tweet this article
Edward Albee’s play about a child whose very existence is in doubt has finally made it to New York.
We’re not talking about Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Play About the Baby, although it’s true that those earlier works cover similar ground. This time it’s Me, Myself and I, which premiered a few years back in Princeton but is only now being staged on this side of the Hudson at Playwrights Horizons.
In both of Albee’s earlier offerings, an older couple taunts a younger couple about a child who just might be imaginary. In Me, Myself and I, the taunting comes from one of a set of adult identical twins, who announces to his mother and her live-in therapist that his brother isn’t real.
It’s a brilliant conceit, and just far enough removed from Albee’s past forays into existentialism that it seldom feels like ground that he has covered before. Could what this young man is saying be true? Is it possible that like George and Martha’s baby boy in Virginia Woolf, his twin has been a figment of his imagination, or that of his frowsy, blowsy mother? It seems entirely possible, since she clearly has trouble identifying her son (“Who are you?” she demands the moment he saunters into her bedroom). And the fact that she named both twins Otto seems unusual, to say the least.
The play percolates for a while as mother and son engage in some outrageously convoluted banter. (“I love both my sons,” the mother says with conviction, “whether they exist or not.”) But things never come to a boil, mostly because there’s never really any doubt that both Ottos exist. Once the second brother arrives and is clearly visible to everyone around him, Albee unwittingly turns off the gas. Director Emily Mann’s slow-motion pacing doesn’t help much, either.
The brothers (distinguished as OTTO and otto in the credits) are played by Zachary Booth and Preston Sadleir, who are made in hair and makeup to look strikingly similar. Booth is wonderfully smarmy as the instigator OTTO (“I’m not a very nice person,” he says several times with a mischievous grin), and Sadleir is appropriately bewildered as the victim otto. But Booth never gives us a sense of why it is so important whether he is twinless after all, and so Sadleir’s response seems overwrought.
What’s left is minor Albee, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an often-hilarious play, especially in the second act when we meet otto’s girlfriend Maureen. She pleads for help from the portentously named Mother (Elizabeth Ashley), but the older woman seems to only be interested in the younger woman’s cultural heritage, first wondering whether she is Irish, them marveling that she is part Cherokee. When Maureen snaps at her, Mother acidly responds: “I don’t come from a small, wet island or a trail of tears.”
Ashley is funny from the first moments of the play, but is also unable to make it seem like anything that happens onstage matters very much. Sadly underused is the brilliant Brian Murray as her longtime companion. Murray was delightfully menacing in The Play About the Baby, but here has little to sink his teeth into. The performance is lively, but the character has no bite.
The same could be said for the play itself, which is not nearly as smart or shocking as it could be. As black comedies go, this one is quite pleasant. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Albee had in mind.
Me, Myself & I is playing at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street (between Ninth & Tenth Avenues). For tickets call (212) 279-4200 or visit playwrightshorizons.org.
Quote from an interview with Albee:
ReplyDeleteAlbee indulges me with an elucidation. “Well, it’s very simple. OTTO is one’s public self. Otto, small otto, whose existence we don’t wish to talk about, is that part of ourselves we don’t want to admit to, and Otto is the third one we invent to disguise the other two. And we all do this.”
Identical twins appear in other Albee plays, notably The American Dream. Again, Albee is firmly, if uncharacteristically, generous about providing an analysis. “It relates to the matter of identity, of who we are and how we invent ourselves and lie to ourselves about ourselves. It goes through a lot of my plays, sure.”
And there is, I propose, always a missing half. “Always, yes. Certainly, we disguise ourselves from ourselves beautifully.”
An adopted child, Edward Albee grew up in a wealthy and privileged home. His adoptive father, Reed Albee, was the heir to the then famous Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. But family life was a story of parental indifference, of a young man’s estrangement and of his rebellion against the artificial values and bigotry he witnessed at home. “Being an orphan,” Albee quietly intones, “I imagined perhaps that I was an identical twin because there was something missing – not having parents or anything of that sort. I would have lots of conversations with me pretending that I was my identical brother and learning more about the way identical twins relate to each other.”
Interesting!!! Maybe we should make contact with Albee and tell him about this project.
Althea
Thanks for this - I will be seeing the play soon and plan to speak with Albee since he will be there.
ReplyDeleteFunny, although I'd been an admirer of his work for years I never realized his plays were for womb twin survivors about womb twin survivors by a womb twin survivor!
I am grateful for his vision and popular expression of it on the big stage. His work always made me feel less alone because I knew somewhere someone "got it" - obsessing about the unseen vagueness amidst charged emotion, endless banter and head trips, always being left with more questions. He's our kind of writer!
Will keep you posted, with pleasure...