Theater: Lonesome Lovers

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The Ballad of the Sad Café, adapted by Edward Albee from Carson McCullers' story, finds the playwright in the role of ventriloquist's dummy. In echoing another voice, Albee has temporarily lost his own. In misconceived fidelity, the playwright has subordinated the dramatic to the novella form. He has relinquished a shapely, abrasive precision of language for mistily inflated poeticizing. As a play-to-play progression, the effect is dismaying; Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is to The Ballad of the Sad Café what an icicle is to its melted puddle.

Sad Café is a ballad of unreciprocated loves, testimony to a voguish dramatic ailment known as incurable aloneness. In their intertwining relationship, the three fantast-lovers in Sad Café are consumed not by their mutual fevers but by their solitary hallucinations.

Miss Amelia (Colleen Dewhurst) is a giantess, a strapping man's man of a woman. She runs a liquor and drygoods store in a dull and dusty Southern town and is as tight with her affections as with her cash. On the weather-beaten clapboard siding of her store, the faded lettering DRINK NEHI is a hint of some ghostly thirst for life. Marvin Macy (Lou Antonio) thirsts for Miss Amelia, and he reforms his rakehell ways to woo and wed her. In the ten scarifying days of their life together, he never beds her. Instead, she flings him to the floor and out of her life with venomous contempt. The castaway takes to crime, and his love-turned-to-hate festers in a Georgia penitentiary.

A hunchbacked dwarf named Cousin Lymon (Michael Dunn) comes along to claim kinship with Miss Amelia and monkey-walk his way into her barricaded heart. Cousin Lymon is sly, querulous and malevolent, but in her shy-smiling gladness Miss Amelia turns her store into a café where her half-pet half-child holds court. One night Marvin Macy shows up, and it is the dwarf's turn to love unrequitedly. Cousin Lymon is infatuated with the ex-jailbird who has seen the world, but Marvin cruelly cuffs him and calls him "Brokeback." The stage is thus set for a kind of gladiators' duel to the death between Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy. Glistening with hogfat and ringed by townsfolk, the pair slug and wrestle each other like mastodons before some prehistoric cave. As Colleen Dewhurst and Lou Antonio enact it, this raw battle of the sexes is charged with a passionate intensity that convicts the rest of the play of emotional anemia.

None of the loves in the Sad Café are of an aberrant kind that dares not speak its name. These loves do not know their names, and Albee is at a loss to make them credible. He resorts to sham mystification as exemplified by a narrator who pops in to bridge the gaps in the script and utter radio serial profundities: "No one can know what really takes place in the soul of the lover." A faintly supercilious device at best, the narrator tediously describes what ought to have been vitally dramatized—a confession of the playwright's failure.