Albee's Great God Alice

...., .. ALBEE'S GREAT GOD ALICE. CRITICS WHO HAVE GRAPPLED WITH EDWARD ALBEE'S Tiny Alice have conjectured about its possible sources. These range from Alic~s Adventures in Wonderland to the plays of Noel Coward, T. S.Eliot, Jean Genet, and several other European playwrights. Surprisingly, no one has mentioIied Eugene O'Neill. Albee himself has repeatedly admitted being "an enormous admirer" of "late O'Neill." "By late O'Neill, do you mean Long Day's Journey Into Night?" asked an interviewer. "Yes," replied Albee; "and The Iceman Cometh and those of that period when he started writing good plays." The interviewer: "Do you mean after he got over his gimmicky period?" Albee: "Yes."! Yet it is precisely the O'Neill of the "gimmicky period" who seems to have influenced the Albee of Tiny Alice. Tzny Alice, said Albee at a press conference, was "something of a metaphysical dream play which must be entered into and experienced without predetermination of how a play is supposed to go."! Since Albee was not so much explicating his playas lecturing the New York critics, his warning about "predetermination" in all probability referred to thinking conditioned by the conventions of, theatr~cal realism. For by calling Tiny A lice "a metaphysical dream play," Albee placed his own play in the tradition of dramatic expressionism that goes back to Strindberg's dream plays and eventually became naturalized, as it were, with the experiments· of O'Neill. Thus we are justified, I think, in approaching Tiny Alice as an expressionistic. objectification of Brother Julian'S nightmare or hallucination.s Further external evidence to support this contention is found in Albee's statement that "Brother Julian is in the same position as the audience. He's the innocent. If you see things through his eyes, you won't have any trouble at all.'" l"An Interview with Edward Albee," in The American Theat'e1' Today, ed. Ala,n S. Downer (New York, 1967), P. 121. See also Thomas Meehan, "Edward Albee and a- Mystery," NeW York Times; December 27, 1964. Sec. 2, p. 16; and "Theater: 'Talk with the Author," NttiJSW'e~k,LX {October 29, 1962),51. 2 Quoted in Louis Calta, "Albee Lectures Critia on Taste," NeW York Times, March 23, 1965~ p. 83. S That the entire play may take place in the mind of Brother Julian: has been suggested by Lee Baxandall ("The Theatre of Edward Albee/' Tfiklne Dtama R'!View,.IX [Summ~* 1~5,1,.33~34) and Leighton. M. Ballew ("Who's Aftaid of T.II1 Alice?" Ge01'gatJ Rw,ew,XX [Fall, 1966].299). ., 4 "Broadway: A Tale Within ,. a Tall," Time;. LXXXV (January 15. 1965), 68. Albee sustains Brother Julian's subjective point of view bt.meant of images of deafness•. Julian teUs usi~ .A~t -I. scene three~ .,that his "periodlof,:baUuCinatioD .' 26.7 268 MODERN DRAMA December "Things" are seen through the eyes of the protagonist also in O'Neill's expressionistic plays, where the action on the stage is distorted in order to capture a character's subjective view of the world. In The Great God Brown~ the most complex and imaginative of O'Neill's experimental plays, the most salient expressionistic device is the mask. Masks are worn by all the major characters, thus objectifying the duality between their outer and inner selves, between illusion and reality. Most of the characters in Tiny Alice from time to time don metaphoric masks, Butler refers to the Cardinal as having to "wear a face,"5 and when Julian first meets Miss Alice, she appears in a matted wig as well as the mask of an old hag. By removing both mask and wig, Miss Alice is suddenly transformed into an attractive woman. Yet this is not her real identity, either. For as we discover later in the play, she is the symbol of the abstraction Tiny Alice. The transformation of Miss Alice from an old crone into an attractive woman-an action that has puzzled critics6-suggests that all is not as it appears to be on the surface and foreshadows the stripping away of illusions that Julian must undergo in order to confront the abstraction, or...