Albee's Box and Ours

ALBEE'S BOX AND OURS "A PLAYWRIGHT-UNLESS HE IS CREATING ESCAPIST ROMANCES (an honorable occupation, of course)-has two obligations: first, to make some statement about the condition of 'man' (as it is put) and, second, to make some statement about the nature of the art form with which he is working. In both instances he must attempt change. In the first instance -since very few plays are written to glorify the status quo-the playwright must try to alter his society; in the second instance-since art must move, or wither-the playwright must try to alter the forms within which his precursors have had to work." This excerpt from Albee 's introduction to his "Two Inter-related Plays" summarizes a decade of his dramatic writing. Often, he blends the two obligations, trying to alter his society through alteration of his forms. New idioms reflect a new consciousness, and each of Albee's plays uses a new idiom. Albee's detractors have pinned his changing idioms to various precursors: Zoo Story brought cries of "Beckett" or "Pinter ," The American Dream of "Ionesco," Virginia Woolf of "Strindberg ," Tiny A lice of "Genet" and "Durrenmatt." But in Box and especially in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung Albee has altered dramatic fornI, so that such charges are irrelevant. Albee's Introduction relates his inter-related plays to another art, music. In the two plays Albee attempted "several experiments having to do-in the main-with the application of musical form to dramatic structure, and the use of Box as a parenthesis around Mao is part of that experiment." Rather than guess at which musical form Albee was imitating-fugue, partita, sonata-we might note that Albee is an heir of the French Symbolist tradition, with its musicality of languageVerlaine : "La musique avant toute chose." All poetry (and much prose) embraces musicality, but the French Symbolists consciously sought new sound patterns, new word melodies in their verse. The major Symbolists avoided the theater and its well-made plays, but Mallarme called for a poetic, detheatricalized drama, and the next generation of Symbolists tried to answer his call. In their plays, especially those of Maeterlinck, plot gives way to mood, action dissolves into atmosphere. Albee follows them in this, but unlike them he converts each character into a skillfully played musical instrument. The first instrument is invisible in Box) the first of the inter-related plays. As we look at a large cube that usurps the stage, we hear the voice of a woman, which "should seem to be coming from nearby the spectator." In the second play, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse137 138 MODERN DRAMA September Tung (about eight times as long as Box) an ocean liner appears within the outline of the box. Aboard are four visible charactersMao Tse-Tung and an Old Woman, who play toward the audience; a Long-Winded Lady in a deck chair, who ((uses as a sounding board" a silent Clergyman in his deck chair. The three speaking characters are soon accompanied by phrases from the disembodied voice of Box. To these two inter-related plays is added a Reprise that again divorces sight from sound. We look at the large cube in which we may see silhouettes of the four characters of Mao (or may not, at the director's option), and we hear a selection of about half the monologue of Box (which may sound like the whole in the theater). In Box we see before we hear: five seconds' bright light upon the hand-crafted cube-not pure geometry but an artifact, like Mondrian's painted rectangles. Albee has already used boxes in The Sandbox) where the child's playing area is equated with Grandma's coffin; and in The American Dream) where Grandma's empty boxes are prophetic of her disappearance. So, too, the monstrous empty box of Box evokes a coffin-not at once perhaps, but as we gradually absorb the words of the invisible woman's Voice. Albee specifies that the woman's Voice be "not young, but not ancient ) either; fiftyish." In the middle of his life, the persona of Dante's Divine Comedy found himself lost in...