Seascape at Orange Beach
“Nancy: Such noise they make!
Charlie: They’ll crash into the dunes one day.”
Characters in Edward Albee’s Seascape
The wife in Edward Albee’s Seascape, Nancy, adores beaches and wants to travel to sandy spots all over the world. Her husband Charlie is content basically “doing nothing.” The contrast runs deeper: Nancy joyfully relishes life while Charlie cowers thinking about death. Cyclically, the couple talk like a merry-go-round, repeating the same lines every time an airplane flies overhead. Nancy: “Such noise they make!” Charlie: “They’ll crash into the dunes one day.”
In January of 2017, my friend Joe Taylor was celebrating a milestone birthday and rented a gulf-front condo in Orange Beach, Alabama for a month or so. For various days and weekends, he invited friends down to share fun times, good food, and interesting conversation. While Roger and I were visiting, the three of us sat on the balcony and by the pool reading Albee’s Seascape, having a civilized and wonderfully enlightening time.
I met Joe at the University of Montevallo, where we worked together on a number of theatre productions, and shared a great love for the Purple side in our school’s unusual Homecoming College Night tradition. He has remained my close friend ever since. Joe was an actor and director in college, while I was a techie. Later, he taught high school theatre in the Washington D.C. area, during the time I taught at Samford University. Seascape was such an intriguing play to read at the seashore, because it takes place on a deserted area of a beach!
Edward Albee himself directed Seascape Broadway in 1975, featuring Barry Nelson and Deborah Kerr as the humans (Charlie and Nancy) and Frank Langella (in his Broadway debut) and Maureen Anderman as the lizards (Leslie and Sarah). Yes, there are two scaly reptiles in the play! Some theatre folks call this work one of the playwright's most beloved plays, and it was the winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Seascape is fantastical story exploring the theme of what it means to be alive. Some critics think the tale is an answer to or a ping-pong exchange with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Clive Barnes, (English writer and dance and theatre critic for the New York Times), observed Albee’s nod to the Theatre of the Absurd, and his relationship to Beckett. In a fairly positive review of Broadway’s Seascape, he wrote: “the purpose of life is life itself — it is a self-fulfilling destiny. We have to come out of the water and get onto the beach, we have to live and we have to die, simply because life is about life.”
Taking place on a secluded expanse of sand dunes, Charlie and Nancy drift into conversation after their picnic lunch. This middle-aged couple lazily chat about their life, their home, their family, and speculate about what to do since they are recently retired. She sketches while he falls asleep, then begin to talk again with the idle discussion drifting into sweeping examinations about existence, about why are any of us even here on the beach called Earth.
Then, suddenly, at the end of Act I, Leslie and Sarah, two lizard-like animals, approach the couple from the deep blue sea. Nancy tells Charlie to lie down in a submissive posture, and Leslie, the male lizard, just watches the human couple, while Leslie approaches Nancy and Charlie, poking them in the side. In the second act, an engrossing conversation emerges between the couples, an incredibly fine illustration of Albee’s ability to manipulate the dialogue of his characters —- captivating the audience while still delving into many significant matters.
When the Berkshire Theatre Group in Pittsfield, Massachusetts performed the play in 2022, Barbara Waldinger wrote a review. In it, she says about the lizards, “But when they learn from the so-called ‘evolved’ species (humans) about the pain of life — emotions, which they have not felt before, the necessity of facing their own mortality — they are ready to return to the sea. But will they? Doesn’t evolution require them to remain, to go on?”
I loved reading this play with two of the more evolved gentlemen in my life. How we would have enjoyed having two sea creatures (or maybe three) creep up from the beach and engage us in ideas concerning existence, especially human existence, from the viewpoint of theories of existentialism! In Seascape, Albee pulls his readers or audience into an adventure that explores what it means to be human.
Why don’t people read plays together more often? Most scripts are rather short since the theatre has necessary time restrictions. So a lot of power, character, plot, and theme are packed into a full story that can be fairly quickly read. It was so fun to hear Nancy and Charlie, Leslie and Sarah come to life with our very own voices. And we learned so much about other people, and ourselves.
Even after seven years, I am impacted emotionally, spiritually, physically, and intellectually by our reading the fantastically unexpected conversation between people and lizards. A reviewer said, “It’s funny, tragic, existential, absurd. And it packs an unexpected emotional wallop that sneaks up on you; as the final applause died down I had tears in my eyes, and I scarcely knew where they came from.” What do any of us do, how do any of us feel, after such an encounter (whether real or imaginative, in life or in the theatre)? An encounter on or near a beach? Do we stay in our cozy little sea or sandpile? Move out of the comfort zone? Evolve even?