Seascape: Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin?

Don't try and sell Edward Albee on the idea of Intelligent Design. Uh-uh. In his Pulitzer Prize winning Seascape, now getting a splendid and entertaining revival at the helm of director Mark Lamos, Albee shows himself as a committed Darwinist. We evolved, we are evolving and we damn well better keep evolving because the only other option is to return to the sea and degenerate back into amoeba.

Though Nancy and Charlie certainly have many of the characteristics we expect from an Edward Albee couple (white, educated, clever), they seem to be in a rather healthy, supportive relationship. Their only conflict at the moment is deciding what to do with their retirement years. Nancy (the always interesting and chipper Frances Sternhagen) wants to travel... to do things... anything! Just keep active. Charlie (a gruff and grizzled George Grizzard) would rather just stay put at the beach home they've retired to. They discuss and bicker with the comfortable familiarity of a pair who have long ago memorized each other's buttons.

Michael Yeargan has designed a unit set of a large and impressive sand dune somewhere underneath a busy flight route, as evidenced by Aural Fixation's thunderous sounds of airplanes passing by. (Given the intimacy of the Booth Theatre and the height of the playing area, the mezzanine would provide the best sightlines for this production.) At the end of their afternoon picnic, Nancy and Charlie are visited by another couple, Sarah and Leslie (Elizabeth Marvel and Frederick Weller), who have grown uncomfortable with their present surroundings and are considering moving permanently to this beachfront neighborhood. They're a much younger pair, and are still adjusting to each other's idiosyncrasies.

Sarah and Leslie are giant lizards, by the way. Catherine Zuber, who's having a great year in costume designing, provides astonishingly realistic outfits for the two and movement coordinator Rick Sordelet has them slithering about very convincingly.

Though both species are rather suspicious and fearful of each other at first, the play evolves, so to speak, into an introduction to the new neighborhood. Nancy is especially thrilled to be witnessing a marvel of nature, but the lizards are confused by life on dry land. Emotions and abstract ideas are concepts they've never had to deal with in their live-by-the-moment existences.

Arrogant alpha-lizard Leslie (Steve Kazee filling in very ably for Weller at the performance I attended) smirks at Charlie for only having fathered three children, while he has procreated thousands of times. But he's never known any of his offspring and the thought of loving them has never entered his mind. Marvel's gentler, sweetly inquisitive Sarah is fascinated by these new thoughts, but soon finds there's a price that goes with the ability to feel emotion.

"Progress is a set of assumptions", claims Charlie. Though he suggests his new acquaintances are nothing more than "brute beasts", it could also be said that he is worse for not welcoming new experiences when the opportunities arise.

As a wise old evolutionist once said, "Use it or lose it."

 

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Frances Sternhagen and George Grizzard
Bottom: Frederick Weller, Elizabeth Marvel, George Grizzard and Frances Sternhagen