Tinny Allegory

Tiny Alice, by Edward Albee, is a delaying action of adroit theatricality designed to conceal a clutter of confused thought. Albee preaches "resign yourself to the mysteries," but in this quasi-metaphysical suspense melodrama he practices only mystification. He brings the playgoer through the Nietzschean revelation that "God is dead" to the Sartrean discovery of the absurdity of existence. Albee adds that man creates God in his own image, a profundity he presumably shares with many sophomores, past and present. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool)? rang with the brassy gong of reality; Tiny Alice is a tinny allegory.

This is not to imply that the play is ever a bore; it is, instead guilefully charged with mesmeric fascinations. It begins with an abrasively effective encounter between two ex-schoolmates who loathe each other. One is a Roman Catholic cardinal (Eric Berry), not remotely a lamb of God but one of the fatted kine of the clerical Establishment. The other is a lawyer (William Hutt), a man of cool, reptilian venom with a hint of Mephistopheles in his brief beard and black-magical manner. They goad each other with insults, and the cardinal muses malevolently on how the lawyer got his school nickname, "Hyena." "Did we not discover about the hyena that it was a most resourceful scavenger? . . . that to devour the dead, scavenged prey, it would often chew into it through the anus?"

Seething, the lawyer states his business. In the prime of life, his client, Miss Alice, the richest woman in the world, is ready to grant the unearthly sum of "100 million a year" for the next 20 years to the Catholic Church. (In view of later events, this may not be money but souls.) All that remains is for the cardinal's aide, a celibate lay brother named Julian, to go to Miss Alice's enormous Renaissance chateau and arrange the details. A shy God-intoxicated man, Brother Julian (John Gielgud) does not dream that he is keeping a rendezvous with temptation, trial and death.

The mansion's walnut-paneled library, in William Ritman's massively evocative set, melds vaulting elegance with mute foreboding. The first person Julian meets is a butler named Butler (John Heffernan), who is not a butler. The first thing he sees is a scale model of the chateau, perfect in every exterior and interior detail. This permits clever wordplay on the ambiguity of appearance v. reality, but its blunt literalism sadly lacks the intellectual subtleties that Pirandello so often brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced by her. The seduction scene owes a discernible if unintentional debt to Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More. In that play, Mrs. Goforth, also an enormously wealthy woman, nakedly tempted a poet-saint in her offstage boudoir. From stage center, Miss Alice tempts the lay-brother saint. With her bare-shouldered back to the audience, she whips open her black negligee and nakedly faces Julian. As he drops to his knees before her, she gives three orgiastic cries of triumph. If Worth and Gielgud were less impeccably disciplined or tasteful, the scene would verge on sexual parody.

Julian marries Miss Alice in Act III, upon which she and her entourage at once prepare to leave him. They call themselves "agents"; they are certainly worldlings; they may be Fate's Furies. Holding a mock trial and firing a mortal bullet into Julian's stomach, they proceed to teach him what Albee believes he knows. Man is alone. The universe is a void. Whatever illusion or symbolic replica of faith man invents to still his fears and help him accept the inevitability of his destiny may be called Tiny Alice.

Albee has written a drama of the post-Christian mentality, but its only emotional vitality derives from Christian symbolism and experience. When Julian is shot, Miss Alice is wearing a dress and cape of blue, a color associated with Mary, the mother of Christ, and she cradles Julian in her arms in the agony of a Pieta. Other invocations of Christianity include the fiery end of the world, Christ's years in the wilderness, his marriage to his church, and his Crucifixion. But the mockery in all this is that Albee regards Christ crucified, or any martyr, as having chosen to be "one of the suicides." This internal contradiction prevails throughout the play.

While Alice's characters are not obvious symbols, they are so obviously symbolic that the conviction of reality drains out of them. Albee puts the burden of feeling on the language. Still, there is more echolalia than eloquence in the speeches. The cast is a marvel; the play could scarcely survive without these players and the taut direction of Alan Schneider. John Gielgud is the paragon of paragons. His thin but resonant voice invariably astounds one by making an orchestra out of a clarinet, and his speech is kingly.

As for Edward Albee, he has too sure a talent for blisteringly direct statement and galvanic stage action to waste his time playing an intellectual shell game like Tiny Alice.

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