Theater: Tinny Allegory

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Tiny Alice, by Edward Albee, is a delaying action of adroit theatricality designed to conceal a clutter of confused thought. Albee preaches "resign yourself to the mysteries," but in this quasi-metaphysical suspense melodrama he practices only mystification. He brings the playgoer through the Nietzschean revelation that "God is dead" to the Sartrean discovery of the absurdity of existence. Albee adds that man creates God in his own image, a profundity he presumably shares with many sophomores, past and present. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool)? rang with the brassy gong of reality; Tiny Alice is a tinny allegory.

This is not to imply that the play is ever a bore; it is, instead guilefully charged with mesmeric fascinations. It begins with an abrasively effective encounter between two ex-schoolmates who loathe each other. One is a Roman Catholic cardinal (Eric Berry), not remotely a lamb of God but one of the fatted kine of the clerical Establishment. The other is a lawyer (William Hutt), a man of cool, reptilian venom with a hint of Mephistopheles in his brief beard and black-magical manner. They goad each other with insults, and the cardinal muses malevolently on how the lawyer got his school nickname, "Hyena." "Did we not discover about the hyena that it was a most resourceful scavenger? . . . that to devour the dead, scavenged prey, it would often chew into it through the anus?"

Seething, the lawyer states his business. In the prime of life, his client, Miss Alice, the richest woman in the world, is ready to grant the unearthly sum of "100 million a year" for the next 20 years to the Catholic Church. (In view of later events, this may not be money but souls.) All that remains is for the cardinal's aide, a celibate lay brother named Julian, to go to Miss Alice's enormous Renaissance chateau and arrange the details. A shy God-intoxicated man, Brother Julian (John Gielgud) does not dream that he is keeping a rendezvous with temptation, trial and death.

The mansion's walnut-paneled library, in William Ritman's massively evocative set, melds vaulting elegance with mute foreboding. The first person Julian meets is a butler named Butler (John Heffernan), who is not a butler. The first thing he sees is a scale model of the chateau, perfect in every exterior and interior detail. This permits clever wordplay on the ambiguity of appearance v. reality, but its blunt literalism sadly lacks the intellectual subtleties that Pirandello so often brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced by her. The seduction scene owes a discernible if unintentional debt to Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More. In that play, Mrs. Goforth, also an enormously wealthy woman, nakedly tempted a poet-saint in her offstage boudoir. From stage center, Miss Alice tempts the lay-brother saint. With her bare-shouldered back to the audience, she whips open her black negligee and nakedly faces Julian. As he drops to his knees before her, she gives three orgiastic cries of triumph. If Worth and Gielgud were less impeccably disciplined or tasteful, the scene would verge on sexual parody.