EDWARD ALBEE died on September 16, 2016. He was the poet of the New Depression. In the late 1960s and till the 1970s, the world was going once more through a Depression. It was not the economic kind. It was something that involved the psyche of the entire generation.
The world was sad. It was spinning out of its orbit through no fault but its own. The previous generation coming from a world war was optimistic. The joys would be shortlived because the coming generations would be a closeted one: it admitted to sets of values while practicing rites and acts that would be, on the surface, deemed unacceptable. Albee would be the chronicler of this malady, inchoate but raging deep inside a humanity proud of the peace it had achieved but breezily nostalgic for things like love of country, friendship, stability of homes and family, and even war.
Everything the world had claimed as it own, it repudiated and questioned. Albee had no answers. He had all the questions and he left us in a lurch looking for answers this playwright appeared to be disinterested in. But Albee’s questions were the answers that the generations required and missed.
I first met Albee through The Death of Bessie Smith. I found the thin paperback of the play in the only legitimate bookstore in our small city. Already, I was hooked to old jazz and from that music, it was a groan away from the blues. I was loving Bessie Smith after I found an article calling her not the queen, but the Empress of the Blues. That was big and she was big and her voice was big. Her lament was the biggest.
The one-act play has two characters talking. Bessie Smith was nowhere to be found. She was the corpse, the dead body after the accident, in the other room. Albee built his play on the story that when the blues singer died in a car crash, no “white” hospital would admit her. Later on, I would find out that nothing of that sort happened. Perhaps, I was expecting a play to showcase the blues singer rampaging and wailing through those dark, dark and yet jubiliant anthems. No blues, no fun. I felt shortchanged.
Then came Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I didn’t understand what the title was all about. It’s a play but it came to the Philippines first as a film. For nearly two hours, a couple, Martha and George, abuse each other verbally at first and then lunge at each other. After a party, the two invite another couple who become George and Martha’s audience.
Elizabeth Taylor plays Martha in the Mike Nichols film, while Richrd Burton is George. The two had a volatile relationship in real life and to reproduce onscreen those moments the fans could only imagine was almost too much. It wasn’t even eavesdropping on a marriage that had gone sour; it was watching marriage being mutilated.
With the film, we were observers of a love lost, and of two lovers who were relentless as they destroyed whatever was left of any link that connected them.
If the characters of Martha and George couldn’t be stopped with their hatred of each other, Albee, as the playwright, was most relentless with the plot. In the film, as well as in the play, George finally revealed the existence of a son. A child—a son—that is traditionally the bond that keeps all marriages intact is disclosed to be an imaginary one.
Elizabeth Taylor, it is said, gained several pounds to play the role of Martha. If people still had doubts as to her ability as an actress, the world woke up to a shattereing picture of home and marriage, and a legendary beauty deglamorized for the role. The act of being made ugly—deglamorized—would become one of the tricks in Hollywood. But, up to now, it is only Liz Taylor, her beauty incomparable, who has the right to own up to any act of deglamorizing. In the film, Taylor is no longer the immortal beauty; she is the mortal fading and faded, subsisting on hate because love has failed her.
It would, however, be the play The Zoo Story that would move the despondent generation and my mine as well. A young teacher, Rudy F. Alano, had recently returned to our small city with so many brave ideas about theater. He directed the play in the old Jesuit college. It became a tradition in our group to produce the play year after year after year.
You can never do wrong with—and in—the play. This, I found out after the good teacher offered me to play Peter, first, and, later, Jerry.
By that time, I’d fallen in love already with the Theater of the Absurd, the flamboyant and fantastic kind in the manner of Ionesco and Giraudoux. The Zoo Story appeared more grounded and, ultimately, dreadfully, thankfully, realistic.
The play has only two characters…and a bench. Peter is seated on that bench in Central Park. Jerry comes in and strikes a conversation. Jerry is described as someone who had been handsome, but already has gone to seed. Peter is decent and smokes a pipe.
Jerry talks about himself without being asked. He tells Peter where he lives and who are there in his apartment. Then Jerry proceeds to tell Peter about a dog. It is a long monologue that sees Jerry agonizing and contorting. Jerry bares all, screams and, finally, cries. I feel you can recite the lines and the world will sit and be appalled.
Jerry, in his story, talks about the dog who always tries to bite him. He befriends the dog but the dog does not seem to like him until, one day, he decides to poison the dog. The dog does not die but it starts to avoid Jerry. Here is where the play goes berserk. Jerry talks about how he misses the dog trying to bite him. He asks, in fact, if the dog trying to bite him was actually an act of love. Jerry believes we should start somewhere, with anything, if we are to love—with anything, with a roll of toilet paper, with “God who is a homosexual who plucks his eyebrows…” and then he blurts the line: “If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word ‘love’ in the first place.” Jerry ends this monologue with: “The story of Jerry and the Dog. The end.” Usually, the audience would applaud, but the play is just beginning with its violent ending.
In the end, Jerry pushes Peter off the bench. Peter gets angry. Jerry takes out a knife. Peter yells, but Jerry throws the knife and asks Peter to pick it up. Peter picks up the knife and holds it as if defending himself. Jerry runs to Peter and impales himself with the knife. He drops onto the bench and asks Peter to run, and Jerry is left onstage dying.
Edward Albee always finds his voice in the anguish of those men and women lonely in a world that questions love. If in The Death of Bessie Smith, the great blues singer was not seen onstage, in his many other plays, Albee could be seen. He is singing the blues and the lament of our generations. There seems be no joy in his characters but his bleakest work, The Zoo Story, ultimately proves him wrong As he is about to die, Jerry spreads his two arms and shouts at the top of his voice: “Thank you, Peter.” Peter answers “Oh my God….”
It is the Crucifixion once more, and Edward Albee understands the pomp and pageantry of faith and loss of faith. Strangely, this religion is not about a god but about men.