Whenever an Albee play is on, I try to get there. Only once was I really disappointed, when I went to see The Play about the Baby. It might have been a case of both miss-casting and miss-directing. When it comes around again, I’ll give it another try.
My reaction to the current production of The Lady from Dubuque, at the handsome new Signature Theatre complex, was laughter and then tears and more tears, still mixed with laughter. Both Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times and John Lahr’s in The New Yorker were favorable – very unusual since the two publications seem to make a point of disagreeing on most theatre! In this case I may have a leg-up in appreciating the extraordinary acumen of Albee’s response to the situation of the play; i.e. a woman dying of cancer and the reaction of her friends and family. I am, myself, a cancer survivor, so obviously I didn’t die of it, but my mother and paternal grandmother did. OK, what does all this have to do with acting?
The mind plays tricks on us, and actors must discover and nurture, not only an understanding of these subterfuges, but a mastery over the use of them for the sake of characters, who are facing immensely painful situations like madness and deathly illness. Initially, it is only natural that people who are learning to act repress their feelings. Usually, that’s the end of acting for them but the select few, like the ones in this performance of Albee’s play put themselves far beyond the call of duty to drag us laughing and sobbing into the epicenter of the cancer world.
By the way, why do we talk about cancer survivors – I’ve never heard of ‘heart attack’ or ‘cirrhosis of the liver’ survivors? Cancer isn’t a disease –it’s not an infection or a malfunction. I see it more like a vicious, deviant element in a society - in this case the body - that has to be destroyed by a bloody revolution. In many cases like mine, radical cutting is required, followed by a poisoning of the entire bodily system through chemo and radiation. Even in the mildest cases, receiving a diagnosis that there is any cancer present in one’s body makes the ‘idea’ of death a ‘reality.’ Cancer is a clever ‘evil’ that possesses the body in all sorts of ways. Not just physically, but mentally it overcomes us with terror. It is so frightening that in former times, people were shunned when they had it – one could not speak of the ‘unmentionable illness!’
There are many plays about cancer, and it’s metastasizing all over the place on popular TV programs. Usually, it is soft-pedaled or treated as a back drop for other drama, because the reality is excruciating and people don’t want to watch its true horrors unfold. It’s too scary! Often we assume we know about cancer because we’ve read a few articles or know people who know people who’ve had it. We like to leave it at that. So why is this revival of a full-blown cancer play getting such critical acclaim and packing them in?
Albee has achieved the near-impossible in brilliantly constructing a ‘comic tragedy,’ and this aspect has been covered in the aforementioned reviews, which are available online. But I would like to go deeper into the actors’ contribution, which of course would not have been possible unless the director, David Esbjornson, had not found a subtext that is utterly in concert with Albee’s intentions. However, each actor must embody the specific pain or reaction to impending death they are facing and draw not only on technique but deal with the humanity that drips from every line. Each one makes us believe that the absurd behavior we are watching is something that could actually happen or we would not laugh and cry, sometimes literally at the same moment.
While the protagonist is howling with pain, a guest is berating her for not being a good hostess! Of course, it’s a metaphor, as is the presence of death embodied by a handsome, white-haired ‘mother’ embracing her child isn’t likely to become an actuality. But those ‘metaphors’ happen psychologically. They do. Believe me, they do! Sometimes, the difficulty of the situation brings out the best in people. When my grandmother was dying horribly from cancer, my father dropped everything to envelop her in kindness. In my own experience of the illness, certainly there was much kindness, but often the expectations others had of me – even the ones I had of myself - when I was undergoing chemotherapy were ridiculous.
The actors in The Lady from Dubuque are emotional acrobats. They are a bit like clowns, who are basically very sad losers, but make us laugh with their antics. Maybe no one, certainly not all, in the cast are ‘cancer survivors’ nor have they necessarily been exposed to the illness through a loved one. But they enter that dreadful world through personal identification with the character’s experience and make it palatable to us by ‘playing’ the humor. They have worked very hard to reach this level of skill – and they are very brave to put themselves through ‘their own painful reality’ in order to bring the ‘reality of the play’ to their audience. They certainly make it look like the Devil’s work. It’s hard to believe that God could be involved in this awful business…
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