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by Michael Cadden
All Over is a vision of life in the shadow of death. Is it also a lost American classic?
Everything old is new again. Although Edward Albee’s All Over harkens back to Western drama’s roots in elegiac funeral rites, after the events of September 11th, it takes on a plangency particularly appropriate to the national mood. An elegy is, of course, a song or poem of lamentation; it expresses sorrow for someone or something that has past. In the wake of 9/11, we have been bombarded with instances of the elegiac—from reporters and rock musicians, poets and television scriptwriters, photographers and five year-olds. Elegies for those killed, usually in the form of eulogies, have filled our city’s places of worship as friends and family have acquired newly found eloquence in the crucible of their suffering.
All Over takes place around a deathbed as its characters attempt to achieve eloquence in the shadow of the unspeakable. The genesis of the play was Albee’s intention to write two companion one-acts, to be entitled Life and Death. As reported by Mel Gussow in A Singular Journey, his excellent 1999 biography of Albee, each one-act evolved into a full-length play: Death became All Over, while Life served as the starting point for Seascape.
In the story Albee eventually chose to tell in All Over, a nationally prominent man endures the last two hours of his life while his wife, children, mistress, best friend, doctor and nurse struggle to come to terms not only with the dying man, who has been central to their lives, but with each other as well. Gussow reports that Albee has said that he sees All Over as an attempt "to examine the power, both destructive and influential, of somebody such as the dying man, whose effect on everybody around him is so profound."
Although this unnamed man never actually appears, Albee hopes "that he’s the most noticeable character in the play." Fortunately for Albee’s audiences, he has given the dying man significant competition for our attention, most especially in the man’s wife and his mistress—two of Albee’s greatest women’s roles in a body of work which features an abundance of them. (To name only the likely suspects: Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the title characters of Three Tall Women.)
In the Broadway premiere of All Over in 1971, directed by John Gielgud, the Wife and the Mistress—the characters have only generic names—were played respectively by Jessica Tandy and Colleen Dewhurst; in the 1972 London production, directed by Peter Hall for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Angela Lansbury assayed the roles. I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company version and vividly recall the passion, humor, and dignity Ashcroft and Lansbury brought to their roles. Like the trapped characters in a play by Samuel Beckett, these women seemed to know that it was their ability to articulate their suffering and joy in a clear and forceful way that ultimately redeemed their lives from the chaos of accumulated experience.
In these first stagings, most critics and audiences were baffled by All Over. Of the theater critics, only The Nation’s Harold Clurman seemed to understand what Albee was after; celebrating the playwright’s theatrical elegy as "the best American play of several seasons," Clurman went on to remark that the work "conveys an existential shudder which has its origins in the soul’s dark solitude." Albee’s fellow theatre artists were similarly impressed. According to Gussow, Tennessee Williams told Albee that All Over was his "favorite of your plays . . . a marvel of controlled eloquence." Playwright Wallace Shawn declared it "one of the greatest experiences I ever had in the theater."
That was true for me as well. Looking back over the negative reviews, which I found so at odds with my own enthusiastically positive reaction, I’m inclined to think that, as is so often the case with American playwrights, Albee was being blamed for not having recycled an earlier theatrical success. F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, famously, that "there are no second acts in American lives"; his observation speaks to a national fixation with "first act" successes. Our artists, in particular, are not allowed to outlive their "breakthrough" moment; having achieved "brand-name" status, they are not permitted to evolve and mature. Hence, too many critics hold Arthur Miller captive to their memories of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; Tennessee Williams is imprisoned by the success of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire; and Edward Albee himself has been boxed and labeled by the admittedly phenomenal power of both the stage and screen versions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Fortunately, Albee, like Miller, has outlived many of those most invested in compartmentalizing the nature of his theatrical gifts. It’s high time to revisit All Over as a lost American classic, to return it to its rightful place in the American canon and on the international stage, and to intoxicate ourselves with the bracing clarity of Albee’s vision of lives lived in the shadow of death.
Michael Cadden is Director of Princeton University’s Program in Theater and Dance.
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