Conventional Albee: Box and Chairman Mao

Conventional Albee: Box and Chairman Mao ANTHONY HOPKINS • THERE IS LmLE IN EDWARD ALBEE'S PLAY(S) Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung that obviously conforms to even an expressionistically liberal definition of "normal" drama. Such things as plot, character, setting, dramatic conflict, dialogue hardly exist in any conventional sense. In Box there is only the stark outline of a large cube and the epithets from a disembodied female voice. The set directions for Chairman Mao specify "the deck of an ocean liner," but the outline cube from Box also remains present throughout. Of the four characters in Chairman Mao, one - the Minister never speaks, and the others utter interleaved but essentially independent monologues. Part way through the play the Voice from Box begins to be heard as well and; like a reprise, lines from Box end the play(s). Nevertheless, it remains that there is a good deal here that is characteristic of Albee's practices in the body of his work generally. Symbols, images, ideas, characters, and not infrequently formal techniques, mark Box and Chairman Mao as continuations and extensions of, rather than radical departures from Albee's usual complex of interests. Boxes, for example, are frequently prominent in' Albee plays. In The Zoo Story, Jerry keeps "a small strongbox without a lock which has in it ... sea-rounded rocks I picked up on the beach when I was a kid" and some letters, pathetic, ragged remnants of his miserable existence. Grandma in The American Dream is busy boxing up, to take with her, everything of value in the apartment. Her boxes contain some old letters, a couple of regrets ... Pekinese ... blind at that .. . the television . . . my Sunday teeth . . . eighty-six years of living .. . some sounds ... a few images, a little garbled by now ... and, well .. . [she shrugs] ... you know ... the things one accumulates. 141 142 ANTHONY HOPKINS In both cases the boxes seem to suggest arbitrary coherence for experience perhaps otherwise random and chaotic. The Sandbox contains Albee's first sustained exploitation of the symbolic potentiality of the box image. Richly evocative, it is both womb and coffin, suggestive of the earth from which all men come and to which all return, and of the enforced sterility and imposed senility afflicting Grandma. Its arbitrary, artificial structure in one way contrasts with the free open expanse of the beach, yet it is also the fortress in which Grandma seeks to defend her integrity against the onslaughts of her daughter. In addition, many of Albee's locations and settings implicitly or deliberately stress a box-like claustrophobia. This tendency perhaps reaches its apotheosis in the rooms within rooms and models within models within Tiny Alice. But the many small rooms of Jerry's rooming house are like so many boxes, as are the animal cages he sees as representative of all the artificial separations in the world. Four times, Albee chooses as his setting the box-like dimensions of the conventional living room. Projected publically by their inhabitants as enclosures of order, stability, harmony, the living rooms of The American Dream, Virginia Woolf, A Delicate Balance, and Everything in the Garden all prove to be pressurized containers of explosive hatred, duplicity, self-deceit, and fear. The skeletal cube of Box, therefore, may be seen as a conSciously abstract example of one of Albee's favored images of the nature of contemporary life. In Box, the cube is environment - personal, familial, social, somatic, psychic, private, public, local, national - from the least to the most inclusive levels simultaneously. It is the life space of each man and of all mankind. The cube is the park bench, the living rooms, Alice's castle, the sandbox, Jerry's and Grandma's boxes all refined away to essential outline. The Voice is the articulated expression of the quality of life within the life space. The images it uses, the stories, or parts of stories it tells, are the metaphoric utterances of a sense of decay, decline, destruction; of the end of honesty, vitality, morality, hope and purpose. The Voice is George's reading from The Decline of the West, Grandma's inarticulate but meaningful cries, Julian's anguished cries of isolation and...