Theatre in Review: The Lady from Dubuque (Pershing Square Theatre Center)

How did we ever get Edward Albee so wrong? His status as one of our greatest living playwrights is now so secure that it's easy to forget how, not so long ago, he was written off as written out. Such early-'80s works as Lolita and The Man Who Had Three Arms were dismissed as embarrassments, the efforts of an artist who had somehow gotten a divorce from his talent. I can't speak to them, but let me register my total astonishment at how, with a top director (Alan Schneider) and a cast that included Irene Worth, Earle Hyman, Frances Conroy, and Maureen Anderman, The Lady from Dubuque lasted a mere 12 performances in its 1980 Broadway premiere.

It didn't help that the critical response ranged from baffled to hostile. "In any case," wrote Walter Kerr, then the Times' chief drama critic, "at evening's end we are left with...three questions and one death, which do not seem to me to constitute a play." And he was being kind. "It is also one of the worst plays about anything ever," sniped John Simon, adding, "Albee turns cancer into a sort of sick joke."

How, then, to explain the darkly mysterious, often brutally funny, and altogether wrenching drama now playing at the Signature Center? The answer is a paradox: Albee's works are crystal clear, but his conclusions are so disturbing that, all too often, we shy away from them, seeking out hidden -- and less upsetting -- meanings. It was true 50 years ago when speculation was rife that George and Martha, the lead characters Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf were symbols of the American Revolution or the decline of Western Civilization or some such thing, not a spectacularly unhappy -- and thoroughly recognizable -- married couple with a taste for bizarre games. Similarly, in The Lady from Dubuque, the author's intentions couldn't be plainer, which may be why they were initially so coldly dismissed.

At the Signature, the lights come up on John Arnone's chic, chilly living room -- a cross between a Westport McMansion and the Temple of Dendur --revealing three couples in a game of Twenty Questions. ("Who am I?" are the play's first words, for a very good reason, as well shall see.) The booze and the remarks flow; the dialogue is sometimes acidly witty, sometimes just acidic. This would appear to be the place where, in 1980, Albee lost the reviewers. Kerr, especially in his later years a defender of psychological realism, found the characters to be too thin and inconsistent. Simon, as always a one-man SS squad scouring the Theatre District for girlie men, complained about bitchy dialogue "that several critics have identified as homosexual back- (and front-) biting in heterosexual drag" -- thus perpetuating the vile canard that Albee was part of a cabal of gay playwrights who wrote in a special code in order to vent their rage at decent married people.

How could they have been so blind? The first half hour of The Lady from Dubuque is loaded with signs that Albee's approach is heavily stylized, that his people are meant to be representative types as opposed to fully drawn psychological portraits. Much of what they say feels addressed to the audience rather than each other, and in David Esbjornson's tautly directed production, they often confide directly in us. Even more strangely, in between games and drinks and bouts of verbal jujitsu, the hostess, Carol, speaks openly about the progress of her grave illness. (It's probably cancer, although the script never says so.) Even now, her candor scalds; Carol knows she has arrived at the end of the line and she is thoroughly disinclined to curb her tongue, both in assessing her friends and describing the pain eating away at her body.

It makes for a very strange party indeed, but it's hardly an unrecognizable one. Laila Robins, who plays Carol, has mastered the trick of seeming impossibly cruel and hideously vulnerable all at once, and her cries of pain are piteous and nerve-shredding in equal measure. The act ends when, Carol and her husband, Sam, having retired for the night -- there's a harrowing moment when he tries to carry her up the spiral staircase without causing additional suffering -- a pair of strangers appears. She is an imposing white woman of a certain age; he is an older black man. Both are impeccably tailored, elegant in bearing, and eerily at home. They quietly confirm that they have arrived at the right place at the right time. With perfect composure, they sit and wait.

At least for now, The Lady from Dubuque remains sufficiently obscure that I'm not going to describe what happens next, but it contains elements of black comedy, psychological thriller, and allegory, all in the service of conjuring the sheer terror that death summons up not in its victims but its survivors. As Albee understands, it's not just loss and separation that loom for these poor souls; it's a splitting of the self that can never be fully healed. Suddenly, that party game question -- "Who am I?"-- takes on dimensions most of us would prefer not to think about, pertinent as they are.

That question of identity also lingers persistently around the title character, and I'm betting you'll marvel at Jane Alexander's ability to thread each line with an eerie mixture of mystery, maternal warmth, and a whiff of the grave. She enters with a finger placed to her lips, warning us not to make a sound, and already we're in her power. "Don't interrupt me, please," she says to Sam without raising her voice, and the effect is like a hard slap to the face. Even when seated on the couch, with a half-conscious Carol in her arms, watching quietly as the others have at each other, she is a stunning presence.

Alexander has an ideal partner in Peter Francis James ("This is Oscar; he's black," is her standard introduction), who combines impeccable manners with a mean karate chop and a taste for baiting white liberals. Insisting that he is one of Carol's relatives, he taunts Sam into making an issue of his race. Commenting on another's remark, he says he hasn't heard of such a notion "in a coon's age," watching with satisfaction while the words, with their ugly associations, ricochet around the room.

As mentioned earlier, Robins' Carol is a true shape-shifter, unforgivably mean one moment and frighteningly frail the next. In many ways, however, the center of the production is Michael Hayden's Sam, a conventional man powerless in the face of unspeakable loss. Beginning the evening as a genial host, he is, by turns, enraged, pugilistic, and, finally, ravaged by existential terrors. (It can't be easy to play a good portion of the second act tied up and on the floor, but Hayden pulls is off.) In a moment of deep distress near the end, he emits an animal howl that reverberates harrowingly throughout the theatre.

There's good work, too, from C. J. Wilson as the vulgarian in the crowd and Tricia Paoluccio as his girlfriend, mistakenly dismissed by the others as a bimbo, and from Thomas Jay Ryan and Catherine Curtin as Sam's best friend and his grating wife. Arnone's set is lit sleekly by David Lander; Elizabeth Hope Clancy (costumes) and John Gromada (sound) also make first-class contributions.

What may be most surprising about The Lady from Dubuque is its deep well of compassion, not an emotion one typically associates with Albee. But it's there, along with a deep awareness that, no matter who we are, we're all headed to the same place. It's another battle in his one-man war against complacency, and no prisoners will be taken. It's taken us half a century to catch up with Edward Albee, but I think we're finally getting there.--David Barbour