Photos: Top- Playbill of original 1975 Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape (check out the cast!) No remaining performances of Zeitgeist Theatre's production in Boston.
Bottom- Production shots of Boston Ballet's Cinderella with choreography by James Kudelka. October 16 - 26, 2008. No remaining performances.
I have little to say about Boston Ballet's remount of the National Ballet of Canada's version of Cinderella of a critical nature. Suffice it to say that it was akin to eating a box of chocolates, calories be damned. Tons of fun for both dancers and audiences with a delicious 1920's set and costume design and the music of Prokofiev, the show sweeps you along with sheer delight. I was taken aback by the large numbers of very small girls attending with their parents last Wednesday night (in the magnificent CitiWang Theatre, featuring one of the most splendid lobbies I've ever encountered, where they serve pretzels and beer at intermission!). How would these teeny-tinies in their Disney Princess dresses make it through a two and a half hour long classical ballet? The answer is, quite well in fact. I saw only a couple of hollering ankle-biters (yes, yes, I had a couple of them myself at one time...) being escorted out by frazzled parents. All the rest were as enchanted as I by this ever-popular fairy tale danced before us with style and energy by the Boston Ballet. Highlights for me were the two stepsisters who created clear characters and got to ham it up mightily (Megan Gray and Tempe Ostergren on 10/22) as a starlet wanna-be and a clumsy glasses-wearing geek. My other favorite bit was Cinderella's solo back in her kitchen after the ball, dancing with one sparkling toe show and one bare foot...inspired (Lorna Feijoo on 10/22). Kudelka's choreography doesn't break much new ground--I found his Cinderella and her Prince duets a bit ho-hum--but does create a high energy and colorful romp that cannot, and does not, fail to entertain. And the show features one theatrically transcendent moment, when Cinderella arrives at the ball pulled down to earth by her garden fairy attendants with huge red ribbons attached to her floating pumpkin carriage. Gorgeous and just so right.
Edward Albee's Seascape is an early play by this most important of living American playwrights and I was very curious about seeing it. Small theatre company Zeitgeist has made some commendable artistic choices in its short tenure in Boston (housed in the Boston Centre of the Arts), as is clear in this current production. The company's Artistic Director David J. Miller directs the full-length version of Albee's play...all three hours of it. Perhaps this daunting length explains in part why I was one of a very small house of about 20 on Saturday afternoon last weekend (a number that shrank a little by the curtain call). Too bad, as this is a play and production well worth taking in. Albee has never needed aesthetic educational philosopher Maxine Greene's advice to "release the imagination". His imagination has led him in more recent years to write a play about a marriage dissolving due to the husband's love affair...with a goat (The Goat, or Who is Sylvia [2000], Tony award for Best Play in 2002). Seascape was honored with the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, so clearly is considered to be a major Albee work. Interestingly, the original Broadway production directed by Albee himself cut the second of three acts, so at Zeitgeist we have the rare opportunity to view the play in its entirety.
The play is set on a location-less beach, somewhere on the American coast. An older couple, Nancy and Charlie, spend most of the first act talking to each other the way long-married couples often do; of their complaints and regrets, as well of their abiding love and hopes for the future. Nancy wants more from the rest of her life, now that the children are grown and they are grandparents. She fantasizes about drifting happily from beach to beach around the world. Charlie seems more set on a peaceful and quiet end-of-days and has no wish to embrace change or exploration, in himself or anywhere else.
Into this quite realistic setting and dialogue at the end of Act One enter two very large lizards who push the terrified couple into the sea. Act Two takes place under the sea where our heroes try to decide if they have died or not (Charlie blames the liver paste sandwiches for lunch that day) and why they seem to be able to both breathe and talk underwater. Soon the lizards reappear and introduce themselves to the uneasy humans as Leslie and Sarah. These lizards are going through the painful process of evolution and want to know everything they can about humanity. Nancy is immediately caught up in the excitement of this adventure while Charlie is far more reticent. Act Two ends with the humans convincing the lizards that they must move out of the sea and onto land...the evolutionary tide is pulling them there in an inevitable fashion.
Act Three continues the lizard couple's education on land and builds toward a climax when they wish to learn about emotions and Charlie manages to elicit painful tears from the lizard-wife Sarah by asking her how she'd feel if she never saw Leslie, her lizard-husband, ever again. This revelation eventually send the lizards back into the safer confines of the sea, where their biggest problems are stupid fish and obnoxious eels, leaving Charlie to comfort a distraught Nancy who mourns their departure.
One of the more surreal play synopses I've ever written and you've likely ever read, right? But Albee is a masterful playwright, deserving of all the accolades and awards he has won over his fifty years of playwriting (he turned 80 this year). The dialogue he writes is always crisp, intelligent and full of rich undercurrents of subtext and complexity. The key themes of the play--marriage and love (and their consonant themes of communication and understanding), evolution, progress and alienation (the scariest thing for the lizards on land are jet planes flying overhead)--are ingeniously woven into a play that keeps moving its audience to unexpected places, all the richer from visiting them.
Zietgeist's production does quite well with the huge challenges this text presents. Michelle Dowd as Nancy and Peter Brown as Charlie are a bit young for their roles, but play them with clarity and sensitivity. Brown perhaps makes Charlie a bit too much of a sad-sack and Dowd has to compensate by playing Nancy at times a bit over the top, but all in all I enjoyed their work, especially in Act One and at the end of the play. Claude Del and Emma Goodman as the lizard couple Leslie and Sarah have a major physical as well as acting challenge and they both did some very nice work here. Del occasionally felt a little more snippy than truly threatening (remember these are human-sized lizards!), but he was convincing in his mix of curiosity and caution in dealing with these mysterious humans. Goodman was quite lovely as Sarah, very feminine even in her lizard get-up and with a genuinely sweet quality as an actor that shone through.
Director Miller does well with keeping everything moving forward, although there were a few long-ish pauses in Act Three that signalled the need for more rehearsal time was probably needed to do full justice to this long and complex play. T'was ever thus in the theatre...Set and lighting design were serviceable but not inspired and my one design complaint was the complete lack of a sound design beyond endless waves crashing on the beach and the occasional jet plane. It felt to me like some judicious use of music, especially in key transitions, would have added another level to the production. But overall it was a treat to see this little-produced and difficult Albee and I hope more theatregoers filled the seats in Zeitgeist's small theatre at the BCA at the show's closing on Saturday night.
