Broadway: A Tale Within a Tail

Edward Albee’s new play, Tiny Alice, is the most controversial dramatic puzzle to arrive on Broadway since The Cocktail Party. Over lunches and dinners, from Keen’s English Chop House to the Forum of the Twelve Expense Accounts, the table talk of the town is Albee’s darkling play about a rich and erotic woman who corrupts a pietistic and virginal man of the church (John Gielgud), seduces him into marrying her, then abandons him on their marriage night, but not before she causes him to be pistol-murdered by one of three confidants, including his superior, a cardinal of Rome.

Everyone is trying to guess what Albee’s Tiny Alice (TIME, Jan. 8) is about, since for the most part the daily critics offered little help. “In such a play,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune, “it is easy for both author and audience to get lost.” “Mr. Albee has virtually ordered the critics not to give away his play’s surprise, and my aim is to be obedient,” said Howard Taubman in the Times, sug gesting his own utter bafflement. “It is difficult to set down with any show of confidence exactly what he is telling us,” said Richard Watts in the Daily Post. “Search me,” said John Chapman in the Daily News. “In Tallulah Bankhead’s famed critical phrase, there may be less to this than meets the eye.”

All About Grumpy. All of which has not unduly saddened Albee. “I’d rather have people talk about what it’s about than have nothing to discuss at all,” he says. “This play is not perfect. All plays have flaws. But I don’t think it is obscure. Brother Julian [Gielgud] is in the same position as the audience. He’s the innocent. If you see things through his eyes, you won’t have any trouble at all.” But the playwright confesses: “There are some things in the play that are not clear to me.”

For many, untangling the narrative symbolism of Albee’s quasi-religious exercise had become a game that might be called “Guess the Source.” There is a butler in it, for example, named Butler. Ah, so. When Marilyn Monroe was a starlet, she had a bit part in All About Eve. At a party in the film she called out, “Oh, waiter!”, and George Sanders, at her elbow, said to her, “That isn’t a waiter, my dear. That’s a butler.” “Well,” said Marilyn, “I can’t yell ‘Oh, butler,’ can I? Maybe somebody’s name is Butler.”

When the audience first sees Irene Worth as Alice, the play’s only woman, she is pretending to be an old hag, wearing a mask and leaning on a couple of canes. “How do you do?” says Gielgud to her. “How do I do what?” she says. That bit of dialogue was exchanged between Snow White and Grumpy in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ah, so, heigh-ho. Gielgud is Snow White, and sensual Alice is Grumpy. But isn’t she really the Virgin Mary? Doesn’t she wear the Madonna’s blue and hold him in the precise attitude of the Pieta as he dies? So he must be Grumpy then, and Grumpy must be Christ. Which Walt Disney never even suspected.

Is Stan the Man? The play is full of little homosexual allusions and games. On a broader scale, is Lay Brother Julian acting out a homosexual nightmare as he unmasks and disrobes the mother, overcomes his martyr’s fantasies and finally forsakes chastity only to have his mother abandon him and his father forsake him? Or is Julian meant to be Julian the Apostate? Is the wedding toast an allusion to the wedding at Cana? Is the cardinal really Stan Musial? Or is the major clue a large, onstage model of the castle in which most of the play occurs, a world within a world?

In this model castle, there is a real mouse. In the dialogue, the mouse is alluded to as a kind of deity that does not exist but is “all that can be worshiped.” In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice and a mouse go swimming together. Alice, who is getting “quite tired of being such a tiny little thing,” respects the mouse for his apparent authority. In dialogue, the mouse’s personal tale is printed in the shape of his tail, as the mouse recites what is to a considerable degree the plot of Tiny Alice:

“We must have the trial; For really this morning I’ve nothing to do.” Said the mouse to the cur, “Such a trial, dear sir, With no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.”

“I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury: “I’ll try the whole cause.

CONDEMN YOU TO DEATH.

But that’s not the whole clue, either.