Transcript
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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.