The Tempters in Albee's Tiny Alice

THE TEMPTERS IN ALBEE'S TINY ALICE Julian: Am I . . . am I being temp-tested in some fashion? WHILE CONTROVERSY OVER THE MEANING AND} by corollary, the worth of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice! has been considerable, at least on one point critics are pretty much in harmony-the play is non-realistic and is indeed essentially symbolic, allegorical, allusive. If one acts on this assumption and examines in depth the structural lines of the play, the thesis that then reasonably tends to emerge is this: a man in modern Western civilization encounters as many difficulties as ever in being fully human-creature of both flesh and spirit-and nowadays yet other exigent, subtle difficulties besides; for he lives among the material easements and spaciousness that present-day scientific achievements increasingly afford, surrounding him to such a degree that the spiritual aspects of his nature may dwindle unnoticed, the more so if the spiritual guidance on which he relies itself turns renegade, leaving him to the hazard of being finally stripped of the essentials of his humanity, the merest dead soul. To phrase this more specifically, at the primary level the model mansion, importantly highlighted in Miss Alice's library, takes on significance very early and gradually presents itself as a shrine, altar, temple, place of magic, which is sacred to the powerful, wholly unfeeling goddess, Alice; at the same time one becomes aware of its having yet other, insistently notable peculiarities, of the kind most likely to be found in a delicately-formed specimen of modern scientific machinery, such as, for example, a computer center. On the upper level of such a drama, then, the model mansion represents the remarkable world of materialistic advantages and easement wrought by contemporary achievement in the natural sciences, mathematics, and yet other sciences that build on these, and Alice herself is the potent sway that such a world can have over the minds and lives of modern men. As to the play's operating on more than one level, allegorically, this perception begins coming to the viewer from the first. In Scene 1, the admirably wrought interview between the Cardinal and the Lawyer, these two have an insistent larger-than-life quality about 1 Edward Albee, Tiny Alice (New York: Atheneum, 1965); the Broadway opening night performance was on December 29, 1964. 22 1970 TEMPTERS IN ALBEE'S Tiny Alice 23 them, requiring a certain empressement in the acting, that suggests a significance beyond the literal sense of the encounter. There is no mention of their individual names; on the contrary, at the very opening and again at the curtain, the dialogue and action concerning the two cardinals in their cage-indeed something unusual about birds of that kind actually in a cage fastens the attention on themimpresses on one visually and aurally the idea of "cardinal," and to that degree moves one away from the sense of the Cardinal, the figure, as an individual and toward the sense of him as a functionary, thence possibly a representative, a type figure. The huge amount of the contemplated gift, and at that only one of a number of such projected gifts, invites the mind toward the non-realistic. The Lawyer's own qualities as shown in that scene-ruthless, cagey, savoring his detestation of his host-leave one well set psychologically, at the very peak of the action, for the infuriated and defeated Cardinal's singleword , hissed malediction: "Satan!" The word is driven home by the Lawyer's pause, by his rejoinder: "Satan? You would believe it ... if you believed in God," and by his burst of sardonic laughter. Especially suggestive of the allegorical is the manner of naming the five characters. Besides "The Cardinal" and "The Lawyer" there is "The Butler"-phrasings familiar to us since the time of the old moralities, with the characters named for personifications or types. Early in the play, in the second scene, it is impressed on the viewer that the Butler's surname-his firstnaIIle goes unmentioned-is Butler, presumably with the intent that one should focus strongly on the importance of his function-the individual man is perhaps type cast? His own bearing and both Miss...