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A
Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making millions, pulling details about you from public records and the Internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a vpn, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24. 7 US based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit, monitoring or just a vpn. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price. Competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today@aura.com hidden protect yourself now@aura.com hidden the year is 1975.
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Ho Chi Minh's Northern People's army of Vietnam enters Saigon, ending America's 20 year war to control that country. Back in this country, New York City goes broke after years of reckless borrowing. And when banks refuse to lend more money and President Ford blocks a federal bailout, the city is forced to make drastic layoffs and service cuts, including ending the policy of free tuition to the city university that had made it possible for generations of poor youngsters, many of them immigrants, to attend college and enter the middle class. Meanwhile, biologist E.O. wilson publishes the book Sociobiology, the New Synthesis, which argues that the social behavior of humans is largely the result of genetics. And that sets off a heated debate over whether the book is advancing the discredit science of eugenics that had fueled the racist ideologies and practices of the Nazis and of American segregationists. And in that year of 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Edward Albee's Seascape, a slightly absurdist meditation on marriage. What makes us human and what makes life worth living? My name is Jean. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I can hardly believe it, but this episode marks the fifth anniversary of all the drama. Each of the four earlier anniversary episodes was devoted to one of the four Pulitzer winning plays of Eugene o'. Neill. No playwright has won more, so I wasn't sure what I was going to do to celebrate this anniversary until I realized that in a way, Edward Albee has racked up more Pulitzer honors than even o'. Neill. Let me explain what I mean. Winning the Pulitzer is a two step process. A jury of experts draws up a short list and the larger Pulitzer board makes the final selection from that. Albee, who won three Pulitzers, might have equaled ONeills four if the prudish 1963 Pulitzer board hadn't infamously decided not to give any drama prize that year, rather than going with the jury's recommendation to award it to Albee's who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But that didn't stop future juries from continuing to single out Albee's work. In addition to his getting the prize in 1967 for a delicate Balance, the subject of an earlier all the drama episode, Albee also won it for Seascape in 1975 and Three Tall Women in 1994, and he was a finalist for the prize in 2001 for the play about the Baby and again in 2003 for My Personal favorite, the Goat or who is Sylvia? That's four decades of award worthy work. The three person jury back in 1975 was so knocked out by Seascape that they refuse to name any other finalist. In his letter to the board, the New Yorker magazine's theater critic Brendan Gill, who chaired that year's jury, wrote that Seascape is written with an elegance that I think only Albee, among his living contemporaries, could have achieved. I gave a full rundown of Albee's early years in the episode On a Delicate Balance, so I'm only going to hit a few of the highlights here. Albee was born on March 12, 1928, and adopted by Francis and Reed Albee, who named him after Reid's father, Edward. The Albee family owned some 200 vaudeville theaters across the country, and young Edward grew up in a wealthy home in Larchmont, New York. But he never felt at home there, and in 1949, after a major fight with his father, Albee moved to Greenwich Village, where he quickly fell in with a circle of writers and musicians. He focused on writing poetry until he met the novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, who suggested that Albee should try his hand at playwriting. Albee's first play, Zeus Story, written a month before he turned 30, made its way to a German producer who paired it with Samuel Beckett's one act play, Crapp's Last Tape, translated both of them into German and presented them at the 1959 Berlin Festival. But the following January when the double bill, now back in English, opened off Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, Zoo Story only drew mixed reviews, but that was enough encouragement for Albee. He quickly followed up with three more one acts, the Death of Bessie Smith, the Sandbox and the American Plan. And then in 1962, came his first full length play, who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was both a critical and commercial success, running for 664 performances. And of course, there was that almost Pulitzer. But two years later, Tiny Alice, a surrealistic drama about faith and money, baffled nearly all the critics. Then came the Pulitzer winning a delicate balance. By the time he won that first Pulitzer, Albee had already begun working on what would become Seascape. It started off as a short play called Life that Albee had planned to pair with another play called Death. But he expanded Death into the full length play all over that opened on Broadway in 1971 in a production directed by John Gielgud, with a cast led by Colleen Dewhurst and Jessica Tandy. It ran for just 40 performances. But undaunted, Albee decided to expand Life into a full play, too, and he eventually renamed it for its setting on a beach along a sea coast where an elderly couple named Charlie and Nancy are bickering over how they should live out the rest of their life until they're interrupted by another couple, two life size and English speaking green lizards who have emerged from the sea and are trying to figure out what's next for them. Too. Seascape was more openly comedic than many of Albee's previous plays had been, and it has a relatively more happy ending, too. Albee was proud of the differences, and he resented it when some critics compared Seascape to Virginia Woolf. He told his biographer Mel Gussow, that if he'd wanted to duplicate the dynamics between the couples in the two plays, he would have called the new one who's Afraid of Two Green Lizards. It was the lizards who most interested him. Albee read books on sociology and animal behavior, and he thought a lot about how the creatures should speak, even considering for a while having them speak in French, although who knows why. He also gave a lot of thought to the names he chose for them, eventually settling on Leslie for the male and Sarah for the female, saying, maybe jokingly that he had named them after his cats. Albee was so taken with this play that he decided to direct it himself. His first choices to play Charlie and Nancy were Henry Fonda and Helen Hayes. Both turned him down. Fonda, who had opted instead to do David Rentel's one man show about the lawyer Clarence Darrow sent Albee a letter of apology saying that he hoped to someday do Seascape in a regional theater, although I don't think he ever did. So that meant Albee had to find other actors to play the roles in Seascape. He considered Arthur Hill, the original George and who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for Charlie and Maureen Stapleton, who had recently won a Tony for her performance in Neil Simon's the Gingerbread lady for Nancy. But he finally went with the respected journeyman actor Barry Nelson and the movie star Deborah Carr. A six time Oscar nominee, Carr had not appeared on Broadway in 20 years, although she had been nominated for a Tony back then for her performance in Tea and Sympathy. Still, Carr said she had instantly fallen in love with the part of Nancy when she was sent the script for Seascape. But playing it would prove to be a difficult experience for her. Albee completed the cast by hiring Frankelangela, a young actor who had begun making a name for himself off Broadway and even in some small movie parts, to play Leslie and the up and coming actress Maureen Anderman to play Sarah. Things got off to a bumpy start and stayed that way. At the end of the first day of rehearsals, Albee threw out the entire second act of the play which he had set underwater. He told his biographer Gusau that he realized that it was not necessary and too fantastical and that it would have been too hard and expensive to construct and change a believable set that had to go from beach to underwater and then back to the beach again. It actually wasn't until 2008 that Albee gave permission for the full three act version to be done in the US. A small company did it in Boston and used lighting to create the underwater effect. However, that wasn't the first time the second act had been done. A couple of European companies in Vienna and the Hague had gotten the rights to the full script before Albee changed his mind about it. But I don't know how they handled the underwater stuff. Albee's two act production of Seascape did tryouts in Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia. It picked up discouraging reviews almost all along the way, with many of the critics complaining that they couldn't hear Deborah Carr. And that was a real problem because Carr had some of the longest speeches in the play. But everyone seemed to like Frank Langella, except maybe his castmates because almost from the start Langella upstaged the other actors by doing focus pulling lizard like movements when they spoke. Albee Chided the actor, calling him pushy and self serving. But Langella, who would later admit in his memoir that he had been an obscure, inconsiderate and and selfish young leading man, kept doing what he was doing. The show finally opened at the shubert Theater on January 26, 1975, where it ran for just 65 performances. But Langella won both the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for best featured actor in a play. The critics and audiences, too, seemed to turn against Albee after Seascape, but he continued writing, and he enjoyed a renaissance in the 1990s that began with Three Tall Women and that lasted until his death in 2016 at the age of 88. Seascape doesn't get done as much as as Albee's other major plays. Its only Broadway revival to date opened at the Booth Theater on November 21, 2005, with the incredible cast of George Grizzard and Frances Sternhagen as Charlie and Nancy and Elizabeth Marvel and Frederick Weller as Sarah and Leslie. Mark Lamos, who had served as artistic director of the Hartford Stage and who would go on to head the Westport country playhouse, directed that 2005 production. And I don't even know how to say how delighted I am that Mark agreed to talk with me about it. Hello, Marc Lamos, welcome to all the drama.
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C
Thank you very much, Jan. Glad to be here.
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B
Can we start by you're telling us a little bit about your relationship to Seascape before you directed it. Do you remember when you first saw or read the play and what you thought of it?
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C
I absolutely do. I saw it on Broadway after the closing was announced because good friend of mine Maureen Anderman was in it. We were actors together during that period on a number of productions and I just adored it. I thought it was an absolutely wonderful play and that was my first experience of it. Then Edward got in touch with me late in my tenure at Hartford Stage many, many years later in 96 or 7, suggesting that I think about mounting Tiny Alice, his play, and mounting it for Richard Thomas, with whom I had a terrific relationship, working relationship, and Richard was eager to do it. And so we did a production of Tiny Alice first at Hartford Stage and then it went to Second Stage Off Broadway. And while that was going on, I began to think about maybe directing Seascape and I talked with Edward about it and I talked with Carol Rothman, the artistic director at the time of Second Stage, and she was open to possibly bringing it in after I did it somewhere else. So that that was my relationship to the play before it actually reached Broadway. In the Lincoln center production, you said
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B
when you saw the original production, you adored it. What struck you about it?
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C
Well, I didn't, I, I didn't understand it. And I, I, I enjoyed not understanding it because I, I just went with the flow of Edwards vision and his mind work of Maureen and Frank Langella, who were terrific as the two lizards. Less successful, I thought, were Deborah Kerr, Andy and Barry Newsom. But they were fine, you know, but I just thought, what an unusual and interesting play. And I'd done a lot of theater of the absurd when I was in actually high school and college. And so I was very open to a play that was in many ways a mixture of realism and sort of magical realism or fantasy. And I enjoy not knowing what something's about. When I look at very modern recent art, for instance, like the Whitney Biennial or something. I enjoy being in a space where I can't pinpoint something. So I think that's what attracted me to the play in the first place. Plus, it's just marvelous writing it. It's very funny script, as you know, and it has an ending that's quite moving and profound.
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B
Okay, so when you decided to direct it, you had to know a little bit more about it. And also I'm thinking it was maybe a challenge to take it on after Albee himself had directed it. So what was that process like for you?
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C
I directed it first at Hartford Stage. George Grizzard played Charlie and Pamela Peyton Wright played the wife. She was absolutely superb. She was very, very moving. The two lizards were actors I had worked with before, Annalee Jeffries and David Patrick Campbell. And I cast them not only because they were wonderful actors, but because they were tiny physically. I remember that Frank and Maureen had been directed by Edward to be very big. And I thought it's more believable if they're sort of iguana sized. And Ricardo Hernandez came aboard to design it for Hartford. And Ricardo had this marvelous idea to make the great sweep of the Hartford's open stage be a beach of light blue sand. It was a very beautiful idea, and it instantly told you that you weren't in a sort of normal beach play, you know, like by Tina Howe or somebody. And Edward just rejected it outright. The minute we took the model into New York, he said, absolutely not. It's a beach, it's all real, and I want sand and blah, blah, blah, you know, ever. So that was scrapped, but the design was still very beautiful and very windswept and gorgeous. And basically, when I worked on Seascape, I said to the actors. We're not going to think about what the play is about. We're just going to play moment by moment. What is your objective? Why are you here? What's your background? How long have you been married? Do you think? You know, that sort of thing? And with the lizards as well, we talked about the physicalization of the two of them, how far to take it. We had movement coaches in both at Hartford and at Lincoln center who worked with us on the movement for the lizards. But again, we didn't want it to sort of supersede the souls of the two lizards. So it needed constant quiet adjustment. And when we were on Broadway, Elizabeth Marvel was pregnant, so we had to do a lot of adjustments for her movement, which were fine, they were just fine. But that's the way I think it's best to approach Edward's work. Everybody's going to be searching for meaning and in fact, you have to lead them in through the humanity in the characters as you would in any play by anybody else, o' Neill or Shakespeare or Chekhov. And so I never found it difficult. And as I said, I didn't care what it was about. I just cared about the dramatic confrontation of these two couples, the lizards and the middle aged humans.
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B
When you look back at it, this is a question that I ask in each episode. What do you think made the board award the prize to this play? The Pulitzer board has a shaky history with Edward Albee and some of his plays. And the critics were really divided on the original production and it didn't have a long run. So what do you think made the jurors recommend the play and then the board decide to grant the award to it?
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C
I wouldn't know how to answer that except to say that perhaps they somehow felt they needed to rally behind a play that was divisive to a certain extent, which is always exciting, that didn't disclose its meanings easily. That was clearly by a great American dramatist. As you know, a lot of Pulitzer Prize winning plays do not survive long. When you look at the list of all the Pulitzer Prize winning plays and musicals and what have you, a lot of them haven't been done in, in decades and won't be. Same with the novels. A lot of them are just unreadable now. They just have nothing to say to us. But somehow I think the Pulitzer always speaks to the moment. And for some reason the judges and the jury here felt something powerful in this play about the moment that it was happening. But otherwise, I don't know. I'm always surprised by, by what gets a Pulitzer? Sometimes I'm not. Usually I'm happy about it, but in this case I was very, very happy that it received it.
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B
Some Pulitzer winners and some that I've spoken with admit that this happened to them. Some poets, winners freeze a little after winning the prize. It's obviously a great honor, but it's can also be something of a burden because of what people might be expecting from you next. But Aubrey kept writing and he kept writing even when critics and audiences seemed to turn against him. And I wonder why do you think he was able to keep going?
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C
Well, he was fearless and he was very tough and he carried a lot of anger with him and a lot of disdain. He wasn't an easy man by any stretch of the imagination to, to work with or to know. And he, he just had that grit that he was just going to continue doing this. And he started writing a play while we were working on the Broadway production of Seascape. He came in one day, we were about to have a run through for him, and it was early on, first run through, and he said, I'm a little tired today, so I'm not sure I'm going to be so great here. And I said, well, okay. Were you up late or are you feeling ill or something? And he said, no, I've started a new play. And. And all of a sudden he said, a character suddenly appeared last night that I had no idea would be there, and I had to listen to him and I had to write it down and he kept me up. And I thought it encapsulated the way he created things. He listened to something and it started to. And I'm sure that's happens to a lot of writers and a lot of, a lot of creative people, but in his case, I thought, yes, this is, this is how he works. Something occurs to him and then it starts speaking and then it moves on from there and a world starts to grow out of it somehow, out of the dialogue.
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B
The script, when I read it, seemed very specific in terms of its stage directions and. Okay, you see where I'm going.
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C
Sorry.
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B
How constricting was that for you?
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C
I'll tell you a story. This is my favorite of the whole time we were working on the play, which it's had its moments of real contention. You know, generally it was a good collaboration, but I knew how Edward was about his stage directions and you're absolutely right. I'm looking over the script now. I have it in front of me on one page alone. We have Sarah nods. They slowly advance toward Charlie and Nancy snorts, fear and trembling sitting, a disapproving look, chiding louder, indicating Leslie head up on one elbow. I mean, that kind of thing, right?
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B
Yes.
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C
So I pretty much followed all of it. And the actors were very good about it, too. They didn't resist it, and they felt that it mostly worked. And I knew that Edward had put these all in late in the game. I think the play was published first without them. But he did care very much about the stage directions. And I remember at one point in this run through, I said, before the run through started, to my assistant, Evan cabinet, I said, evan, I want you to sit next to me on my left hand with the script and follow the script along as we go line by line, because Edward's going to be on my right, and he's going to be taking notes and passing some notes to me as we go, but we're not going to stop. And Evan said, okay. So Evan has the script right in front of him. He's inches away from me. We're shoulder to shoulder. And about halfway through the play, the character of Charlie, played by George Broussard, screams. And George screamed this line, and Edward sort of went, oh, you know, next to me. And then he, he wrote a note and pushed it over to me very angrily. And it said, that's way too big. And I looked at Evan and I said, what's the stage direction? And he said, screaming. I moved the script over and I said, here's the stage direction. It says screaming Edward. And he said, it's the memory of a scream. Meanwhile, the actors are trudging on, you know, after it was over, I said, and how the. Do you think I'm going to tell him to play the memory of a scream? And he just chuckled and didn't answer. But, God, but those stage directions, you know, they're. They're really not to be resisted. They're in almost all his plays. I mean, he made sure that they would be there before he, he, he went to playwright heaven or hell. And they do help. Even if the actor ultimately says, I don't think that's right for me, or you feel it's not right for them. They give you a sense of what the author thought should happen.
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B
Have you, did you have the chance to read the famous missing second act?
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C
No. He, he, he. He said, don't read it. I didn't. Okay, yeah. I don't want to. I won't clutter my head if, if this living playwright doesn't want me to. I'm not going to do it. I'm, I'm doing his bidding, you know, so I didn't.
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B
It sounds as though, even though he, he could be, as you say, difficult, that you and he found a way to, to, to collaborate well together.
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C
Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, contention in, in any creative collaborative act is always going to be a part of what makes the birth happen, you know, and as long as you respect each other as artists and as workers at the task, you achieve something. I always, whenever I work with a living writer, I do what they ask me to or what they tell me to, because it's only fair.
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B
This is my final question, and it's, where do you think Edward Albee's reputation stands today? And I ask this because when people list great American playwrights, they're apt to say, today, Miller, Williams, maybe o', Neill, and maybe Tony Kushner. And yet Edward Albee's name appears on, on the Pulitzer list more than any other playwright. Now, Eugene o' Neill won four, Albee, three. But Albee was also a finalist a few times. Clearly along the way, his genius, his contribution was recognized. Where do you think his reputation stands today?
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C
I feel personally, it's a towering reputation. I mean, just play after play is a unique, sometimes groundbreaking experience. Three Tall Women, Seascape, Tiny Alice, the really experimental things he did after Virginia Woolf, and the things, the little early plays he did, the Sandbox, and I mean, they're absolutely marvelous. And no one else writes anything like that. He was able to write naturalism or realism or whatever you want to call it in Virginia Woolf. But at the same time, if you really look at that script carefully, it's full of absurdist touches. I mean, there's a, there's a false child there. Right. You know, I mean, it's, it's just full of strange, strange things, as is a Delicate Balance, which is, I think, one of the great American dramas of the 20th century. It's a towering achievement and very mysterious. It's a really mysterious play. Yes, and, and yet deeply satisfying when it's played well and directed well. So I, I, I, I, I think he's right up there with, with the other playwrights you mentioned, and, and I think was an inspiration to them, to be honest, in some ways, as he began working.
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B
Yes, I agree with you that he's one of the greats, and I want to thank you for taking this time to talk with us about this particular play of his, Seascape. Thank you very, very much, Mark.
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C
Thank you, Jam. I liked strolling down Memory lane with you
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B
and thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me@janbreadwayradio.com.