New Plays: Dead Space

Broadway is so commercially minded, goes one prevailing myth, that it will not permit a playwright the creative right to fail. To judge by its seasonal multimillion-dollar losses, Broadway is about as uncommercial an enterprise as can be imagined, and the right to fail is honored more often than not. Ever since the success of Virginia Woolf in 1962, Edward Albee has exercised this right annually. Tiny Alice, The Ballad of the Sad Café, A Delicate Balance, Malcolm, Everything in the Garden, and now Box and Quotations from Mao Tse-tung represent the alarming deterioration of a formidable talent.

Albee’s characters have never been quite believable, but he used to have a fine knack for making their hostilities waspishly real. His weakness has been an inability to spin a plot, which is why he has adapted and borrowed so much. In Box-Mao he tries to make a virtue out of that weakness by eliminating any narrative whatsoever. The resulting story vacuum masquerades as an experiment in abstraction.

For the first ten minutes, there is no one at all onstage. The set is simply the metal framework of a box the size of a room. On a garbled tape recording, the voice of Ruth White—middle-aged, pensive, measured and monotonous—fills the box and the theater. The voice is almost sleep inducing, like water lapping persistently at a sea wall. Actress White’s monologue consists of some pretentious restatements of the obvious: Art is order; craftsmanship is waning; children in far-off places are starving to death.

After this, the box is supplied with a raised platform so that it seems like the sun deck of an ocean liner. On it sit and stand four characters. One is Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Wyman Pendleton), who mouths Marxist-Leninist platitudes about the irreparable decline of the imperialist West. Another character is a decayed society drone (Nancy Kelly) who recalls her frustrated attempt at suicide together with such intimate details of her sex life as the smooth tautness of her husband’s scrotum. Another woman (Sudie Bond) recites the doggerel couplets of a poem called Over the Hill to the Poor house. The fourth character, a man with a pipe, lies silently in a deck chair, exhibiting what can only be called amazing restraint.

While each of the monologists is interrupted with a certain metronomic regularity, there is no visible thematic link between the speeches, though a mood of melancholy and decay permeates the evening. Each speaker seems to be addressing himself, a form of alienation that succeeds wonderfully in alienating the audience. It may be that Albee had in mind Walter Pater’s dictum that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” The kind of music one gets in Box-Mao is the dead space between notes.