Death as a Mirror of Life: Edward Albee's All Over

Death as a Mirror of Life: Edward Albee's AllOver ROBBIE ODOM MOSES • THE CRITIC Richmond Crinkley erred in judging Albee's All Over (1971) to be a "play about the end of the haute monde," and "an elegy for a particularly sterile social milieu."l The import ofAll Over is not restricted to a single social class, nor does the play sound, as critics like Martin Gottfried2 and Jack KrolP thought, the death-knell of Albee as a dynamic playwright. In addition to being, as Henry Hewes4 attests, an honest and realistic reflection of contemporaneity, All Over confronts, as the title suggests, the endemic trait of all living organisms. Death, the great leveler to a poet like William Cullen Bryant, is, for Albee, man's final confrontation with life. In the play, death is tantamount to a metaphysical conceit, with the death of the body being but one thematic strain. The famous man, whose dying is both a public event for the press and the crowd awaiting word of his demise, and a private ritual for the circle of intimates assembled for the vigil, is the instrument through which Albee explores some issues attendant to dying and death. The age at which a person becomes aware of death is an idea examined that is important to the development of psychological maturity. Knowing her husband as a thorough man with almost as much knowledge about law as Best Friend, Wife forces the lawyer into a deeper meaning of death when she dismisses fifteen, "the age we all become philosophers,"5 as the age when he became aware of personal extinction: "No, no, when you were aware ofit for yourself, when you knew you were at the top of the roller-coaster ride, when you knew half of it was probably over and you were on your way to it" (AO, pp. 90-91). Best Friend reveals that the awareness of the 67 68 ROBBIE ODOM MOSES inevitability of death came at thirty-eight and reflected itself, for him, in the making ofa will. The modern tendency to dehumanize death is another issue broached in the play. The man's removal from the hospital to his former residence, Mistress relates, occurred in obedience to his instructed need to die in familiar surroundings: "He said ... here. When it becomes hopeless ... no, is that what he said? Pointless! When it becomes pointless , he said ... have me brought here. I want a wood fire, and a ceiling I have memorized, the knowledge of what I could walk about in, were I to. I want to leave from some place ... I have known" (AD, p. 10). Wife articulates the growing concern about the loss ofhuman dignity in the prolongation of life solely by machine. Despite Daughter'S and Nurse's protests over moving her husband from the hospital, she recognized that a network of tubes and wires obscures humanness and does not constitute life: "A city seen from the air? The rail lines and the roads? Or, an octopus : the body of the beast, the tentacles electrical controls, recorders, modulators, breath and heart and brain waves, and the tubes!, in either arm and in the nostrils. Where had he gone!? In all that ... equipment. I thought for a moment he was keeping it ... functioning. Tubes and wires" (AD, p. 9). Anticipating the appearance of a book like Marya Mannes' Last Rights (1973) popularizing the issue, Albee in this play forcefully combats resignation to dehumanized and degrading death. The dying Husband-Father-Lover-Best Friend concealed behind the screen is also the "other" whose rendezvous with death forces the watch to stare the Great Spectre in the face. For Doctor, "Death is such an old disease" (AO, p. 24) with which he has long been familiar. During his sixty years of practice in which he has presided at the deaths of both the Wife's and the husband's parents, Doctor has found his niche within the cycle of life: "I'm rather like a priest: you have me for the limits, for birth and dying, and for the minor cuts and scratches in between. If that nagging cough keeps nagging, now it's not me...