Night Games

By Gerald Clarke

THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE by Edward Albee

The difference between a good play and a bad one is not the craft, energy or even the intelligence the author has put into it. It is his voice: a good play could have been written by no one else, and, from beginning to end, the audience knows that it is seeing something unique and hearing words that have never before been combined in quite that way. The Lady from Dubuque is one of those dramas, and, like fingerprints that can never be erased, every line bears the name of Edward Albee. It is not only fine theater, savagely funny and affecting. But it is also his best work since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? nearly 18 long years ago.

The curtain rises on that familiar Albee landscape, a living room late on a Saturday night. Three young couples have been playing Twenty Questions, or, more accurately, Who Am I? Sam, the host (Tony Musante), is up, and though everybody else is tired of the game, he refuses to quit He wants an answer. His wife Jo (Frances Conroy) stops him, however, with a game of her own. One by one she tells their friends exactly who and what they are: Fred is a crude redneck, and Carol is his latest bimbo; Edgar is a spiritual cripple, and his wife Lucinda is an irritating bore. But everyone forgives Jo because she is visibly dying of cancer and is just radiating a part of her own intense pain. Jokes Edgar: "Any well-stocked larder should have ridicule and contempt."

The lady from Dubuque enters only when that overflowing cupboard has been emptied, after the guests have left and Jo and Sam have gone upstairs to bed. Her title is derived from Harold Ross's famous statement that he was not editing The New Yorker for "the little old lady in Dubuque." Albee uses it ironically, and his mysterious lady, played with ultimate sophistication by Irene Worth, is a figure of commanding presence. Coming down the next morning, Sam discovers that she and her black male companion (Earle Hyman) have taken charge, emptying ashtrays and removing glasses. "Who are you?" Sam asks, varying his own line from the night before. "Jo's mother from Dubuque," Worth answers. But she is, it seems, an angel of death, or some other instrument of mercy, who has arrived to relieve Jo of her misery.

With daylight, last night's guests return to make up. They automatically accept the fact that Worth is Jo's mother and tie Sam up when he impotently protests. Even Jo, half delirious with painkillers, is drawn to her, finally begging the black companion to carry her to bed, and to death. As Sam gives up his role as husband and protector, so he loses his identity. The shape of our lives, Albee is saying, is created by the needs of those around us. When those needs disappear, so, in a sense, do we. Jo's pain is physical and therefore transitory; Sam's is spiritual and therefore endless.

For almost two decades, Albee often buried his plays under metaphor and meaning, sometimes forgetting that drama, by definition, demands a clash of living characters, as well as ideas. In The Lady from Dubuque, he has returned to the style of Virginia Woolf. This is a smaller play, shorter and less emotionally demanding. But it is a major work nonetheless, and like the enigmatic lady of the title, Albee is very much in control. -- Gerald Clarke

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