Symbol and Substance in Tiny Alice

SYMBOL AND SUBSTANCE IN TINY ALICE THE DECLINING AUTHORITY OF Christian belief weighs heavily on many modern playwrights much as it has on poets since the Victorian period. Since "Dover Beach" artistic response to the loss of faith has often been indirect and even furtive, a kind of diffident disguising of a painful and provocative subject. Attempts to discredit Christian institutions and God Almighty have sometimes ended in backsliding statements of renascence in belief and in orthodoxy. Frequently unsure of their own heresies, the artists have presented them not as dogmatic utterances from a stage anti-pulpit, but as clever conjurer's tricks which only hint at the immense significance of the subject. This is the trouble with Albee's Tiny Alice. It is a play which invites its audience to play games like "Guess the Source" or "Find the Complex." Though titillating this is confusing, and once the curtain is down on the initial productions one may wonder if the play returns us to a theatrical tradition unaffected by its presence. Albee's symbolic tricks begin with the title. Is Tiny Alice an echo from a children's story about a little girl who drinks a magic potion imperiously marked DRINK ME and is enabled to step into a lovely garden, or is Tiny Alice a tiny bit of "truth" derived from the Greek etymology of the name "Alice"? The critical outpouring which greeted the New York production of the play pounced upon its guessing-game nature with fervor but with little intelligibility. Albee's view of the play is summarized in remarks he made at the press conference shortly after the opening and later published in the 1965 Burns Mantle Yearbook as an introduction to the play.! He insisted that the story is perfectly straightforward and his summary of it should be the control for any attempt to order the play's symbols or interpret its meaning: A lay brother, a man who would have become a priest except that he could not reconcile his idea of God with the God which men create in their own image, is sent by his superiors to tie up loose ends of a business matter between the church and a wealthy woman. The lay brother becomes enmeshed in an environment which, at its core and shifting surface, contains all the elements which have confused and bothered him throughout ! The Best Plays of I964-65, ed. Otis S. Guernsey, Jr. (New York, 1965). 92 1969 SYMBOL AND SUBSTANCE IN Tiny Alice 93 his life; the relationship between sexual hysteria and religious ecstacy; the conflict between the selflessness of service and the conspicuous splendor of martyrdom. The lay brother is brought to the point, finally, of having to accept what he insisted he wanted: union with the abstraction, rather than man-made image of it, its substitution. He is left with pure abstraction-whatever it be called: God or Alice-and in the end, according to your faith, one of two things happens. Either the abstraction personifies itself, is proved real, or the dying man, in the last necessary effort of self-delusion, creates and believes in what he knows does not exist. Clearly Albee is saying something about the changing nature of man's primordial religious instinct. The old God is dead, executed by science and materialism. Religion, heretofore a collection of images drawn from social needs and expectations, returns once again to the individual who can create a fresh view of God. Julian tells Butler that his confinement to a mental home was the result of his inability to reconcile himself to what he perceived as the abstract nature of God and the real use to which men have traditionally put God. It is God the mover, the creator, not God the puppet created by man which Julian seeks. The question that Tiny Alice asks is whether or not man is actually prepared to abandon the illusions of established religious symbols for the kind of abstract religious energy which the new age of science proposes to him. Albee begins by caricaturing the established symbols. One may perhaps see Butler, Cardinal, and Lawyer as outrageous personifications of three eras in Western, and...