Playwright: Edward Albee
At: Organic Theatre Company at the Kathleen Mullady Memorial Theatre
Phone: (773) 561-5699; $25-$30
Runs through: June 1
Since this is an Edward Albee play, everyone drinks heavily, but otherwise, the three couples playing Twenty Questions—henpecked Edgar and vapid Lucinda, bellicose Fred and vulgar Carol, and hosts meek Sam and acerbic Jo—are fairly representative of East Coast Suburban Academia. But Jo's ill temper has a justifiable source—she has terminal cancer and her rage against the Dying Of The Light is a response to physical pain exacerbated by her comrades' dogged refusal to acknowledge it.
Into this dystopia drop a pair of affluent, urbane, fashionably dressed intruders—one WASP, one African-American—whose conversation reveals them to be curiously intimate with the superstars of world history. Of COURSE they're heavenly visitors—angels, if you will—immediately identifiable in the iconography of modern drama by their monochrome white (but tastefully subdued) garb. Their powers include assuming whatever shape is necessary to ease the traveler's passage from this world to the next—in this case, the mother Jo longs to see once more. Sam opposes their interference at first, but gradually allows himself to be comforted by 'The Lady From Dubuque' (to New Yorkers, a mythical figure from the terra incognita of America's western frontiers).
Albee's first act introduces information that will figure in the second, but at the play's 1980 premiere, audiences were confused by the transition from realism to fantasy. Brenda Sabatka's scenic design for this Organic Theatre production proffers a hint of what is to come, however, in its stark Edward Hopper-like decor, with stairs leading to a second story barren and mysterious as a viaduct beneath the Styx. And though the occupants of this universe might be boring, their unpleasant dynamics repeated rather than developed by the author, the actors who portray them are never so. Under Ina Marlowe's direction, the despair behind their boorishness is always palpable, invoking our understanding, if not quite our sympathy.
The effect is to make us as grateful for supernatural intervention as its beneficiaries. Especially when the Uninvited Guests—one of whom was dubbed 'the sweet reaper' by a spectator following the show—are as charming and hospitable as Lynnette Gaza and Phillip Edward Van Lear play them. Morituri te salutant.