Curiouser and Curiouser: A Study of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: A STUDY OF EDWARD ALBEE'S TINY ALICE WHEN Tiny Alice FIRST APPEARED IN New York its reception was something less than ecstatic. The general impression was that Albee had moved over to join that school of the deliberately boring and repulsive then in process of being identified as Camp. At best it was thought to be a personal therapy paralleled perhaps by Tennessee Williams' Camino Real; at worst it was a confidence trick pulled on the world in general and the drama critics in particular. Certainly Albee's bland assurance in a note to the published version that the play was "less opaque in reading than it would be in any single viewing " was an incredible admission of failure on the part of a dramatist. Nevertheless for all its weaknesses Tiny Alice does serve to demonstrate Albee's commitment to continuing experimentation. Yet while he consciously abandons the formula which had so nearly won him a Pulitzer Prize it is clear also that thematically speaking Tiny Alice represents a logical step forward from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? So that a close examination of the play, while not redeeming its validity on the stage, does reveal Albee's continuing fascination with the theme of reality and illusion, and his concern with refining his own definition of these terms. If the need to face reality was the main principle which emerged from Whds Afraid of Virginia Woolf? then Albee had done little to define exactly what he meant by reality in that play. Tiny Alice remedies this and in fact attempts a definition which is in many ways anti-Platonic. The illusions of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been largely the Faustian distractions of sensuality and sterile scholarship . He had made no attempt, however, to integrate the metaphysical world into this picture nor to assess its validity as a part of the reality to which he urged his characters. Tiny A lice continues to urge the acceptance of reality as a way to some kind of secular salvation but in doing so Albee clearly rejects the validity of metaphysical abstractions, identifying them as an expression of man's· fear of facing the reality of the human condition. The plot can be stated fairly simply. Miss Alice, a young but apparently eccentric semi-recluse, wishes to leave a large sum of money to the church. She accordingly sends her lawyer to a Cardinal 258 1967 CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: ALBEE 259 who, on promise of the money, agrees to send a young lay-brother, brother Julian, to Miss Alice to arrange terms. When Julian goes to the castle in which Miss Alice lives it becomes apparent that she, in conjunction with the lawyer and her butler, is part of a conspiracy aimed at seducing him away from the church. A marriage is arranged between Alice and Julian at which the Cardinal officiates. After the marriage, their mission apparently completed, they leave, having first shot Julian when he refuses to accept their version of reality. He dies clinging onto a model of the castle which has dominated the stage throughout most of the play. The origin of julian's early acceptance of the metaphysical world as a kind of supra-reality is outlined by Albee by means of quasi-parables . It becomes apparent that the impulse to predicate an abstraction, in his case and by implication in others, derives from the harshness of the facts of the temporal world. Julian describes, for example, the situation of a person finding himself locked inside a closet in an attic. In order to retain sanity that person is forced to predicate the existence of somebody who can eventually open the door and release him. As Julian says, "My faith and my sanity ... are one and the same."l The need to personify the abstraction to which the mind gives existence results in a belief in a god. Similarly in another storyIparable Julian describes the moment in his childhood when he had first felt the need for this predication which is clearly seen by Albee as a form of escapism. He had been severely injured in a fall and his calls...