From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee by Anne Paolucci (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 339 misused: Jones' Dutchman is hardly a notable example of "Happenings," and "literal expressionism" is an impossible jumble. The latter is supposed to characterize the dramas of Wesker, who is as irrelevant to the purported subject of this book as are Betti, Osborne, Strindberg, and others here considered. The reprinted long Eliot article does not even deal with drama, though it does discuss Eliot's essays and poetry; on the other hand, poetic "American drama in social context" is totally ignored: a representative sample of this book's misleading title and lack of focus. MYRON MATLAW Queens College of the City University of New York FROM TENSION TO TONIC: THE PLAYS OF EDWARD ALBEE, by Anne Paolucci. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques Series. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; and London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, Inc., 1972. 143 pp. $5.95. Anne Paolucci contributes an important addition to Albee commentary in From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. A tidy book in the Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques series, From Tension to Tonic reads and informs swiftly (134 pages of actual text), in part because its author modestly disavows any intent to pursue "theses or formal patterns of criticism" (p. xiii). When, however, she does attempt in the opening chapter a far-ranging purview of Albee's position among today's dramatists, Professor Paolucci offers one of the more challengeable premises in an otherwise moderate, cautious book. She declares that "Albee is the only playwright, after O'Neill, who shows real growth, the only one who has made a serious effort to break away from the 'message' plays which have plagued our theater since O'Neill" (p. 5). Her zeal for her subject perhaps is understandable, though the establishing of Albee's supremacy among his contemporaries might impress some followers of drama today as ungracious and intolerant with respect to writers such as Arthur Miller, who can deal with individual psychic and metaphysical dilemmas within a socially-oriented dramatic idiom. Fortunately, Professor Paolucci does not press artistic comparisons any further but instead devotes the remainder of her book to a sensitive, clearheaded explication of the individual plays, excluding Albee's adaptations from fiction. Her perceptive readings permit her to identify the continued experimentation in structural format reflected in Albee's pieces. Yet all the varieties of exterior shapings - culminating in Box/Quotations - serve to express Albee's consistent existential perspective on life. When commenting on The American Dream, for instance, Professor Paolucci discerns a key underlying issue: "if we are merely acted upon - as the Young Man's account of his condition leads us to conclude - then human freedom is a myth" (p. 34). This theme the author brings to the surface time and again, in nearly all Albee's works considered. Professor Paolucci's handling of the separate dramas is systematic and 340 BOOK REVIEWS lucid. One can locate in each chapter (usually early in the discussion) a crystallized verdict of the play involved. Beyond the illuminating summary statements, From Tension to Tonic becomes ultimately invaluable to serious and casual readers alike for the thought-provoking and wholly workable renderings of the plays. Clearly, Professor Paolucci has scrutinized Albee's pieces with care and close attention; as a result, her findings are fair, informative, and completely credible, even if not outright convincing in every instance. The Zoo Story, to illustrate, "is a reduced version of the four-way conflict of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (p. 37). Of the existential dilemma conveyed in Virginia Woolf, she declares that "the younger couple mirror our own embarrassment and our public selves; Martha and George, our private anguish" (p. 46), thus opening up for viewers the entire reflected duality of the two couples and their non-existent offspring. The author also provides a plausible, effective interpretation of Tiny Alice, wherein "the replica is the symbolic core of the play; it is also the symbol of Julian's impossible craving for certainty and faith. As he strips away the dead layers of illusion, the dollhouse slowly comes to life, forcing him to re-evaluate reality and the facts of his life" (p. 72). Similarly, the baffling predicament in A Delicate Balance...