Playwright: Edward Albee
At: Signal Ensemble Theatre at the Chopin Theatre,
1543 W. Division
Contact: ( 773 ) 347-1350; $10-$15
Runs through: February 18
With Seascape, Edward Albee makes a startlingly optimistic statement about the ability of humans to evolve as their personal landscapes make seismic shifts around them.
However, that point is brought home not by humans but by the human-sized lizards in the Signal Ensemble Theatre production of Seascape, running through February 18 at the Chopin Theatre.
After an adequate first act, Seascape comes to life in a production that largely captures a play that is whimsical and profound, comedic and deadly serious, absurd and inarguably rational. All of these wondrous elements surface along with Leslie and Sarah, a husband-and-wife team of reptiles who have come from the bottom of the ocean in a mid-life crisis of evolutionary transmogrification.
Laura M. Dana's fantastical lizard costumes ( immensely detailed creations of scales, claws and slithering tails that actually succeed in making the actors look more reptilian than human ) grab the attention with their astonishing marvelousness. The dialogue between the lizard couple and the human couple they encounter on the beach sustains Seascape as a provocative treatise on the ineluctable mobility of life.
As with Albee's better-known ( and far more cynical ) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Seascape deals with two couples. The humans, Nancy ( Mary O'Dowd ) and Charlie ( Don Bender ) , are a long-married duo whose ideas on how to spend their golden years differ markedly. Charlie wants to do nothing, to burrow into a life of naps and novels and finish his life in a state of comfortably inertia. Mary wants activity, change and discovery, starting with an around-the-world exploration every beach on the planet.
Director Ronan Marra gives us a first act that sets up the conflict but is marred by the one-note, breathless enthusiasm of O'Dowd's Nancy. Every word she utters has an oh-my-god-I'm-having-a-revelation brightness that quickly grows grating. As Charlie, Bender shows why he's been a stalwart of dependable excellence in the non-Equity theater scene for years. He shows Charlie not just as a passive lunk, but also as a man mired in fatalism and shaded by fear and hostility toward change.
When the lizards Sarah ( Georgeann Charuhas ) and Leslie ( Aaron Snook ) slink over the sand dunes at the close of Act I, Seascape starts to illuminate. Sarah and Leslie no longer feel at home at the bottom of the ocean, but they're not sure about establishing a new life on land. So is established a witty parallel between fantasy creatures and ordinary humans; both couples are on the verge of a great unknown, both literally, ( the play takes place on the edge of the ocean ) and figuratively.
Nancy's view: 'Mutate of perish. Let your tail drop off. Change your spots, or maybe just your point of view.'
Charlie's: 'I'm happy doing nothing.'