Stage

...That may have been partly the fault of the performers in the production I saw (Tovah Feldshuh and William Katt), but, despite my admiration for Norman as playwright, I suspect that the problem is in the script itself...

...Two performers wander restlessly around the stage, approaching and withdrawing from one another, until their two characters settle on a sturdy coffee table and join hands...

...There are feminist overtones in the momentary alliance of Sarah and Hagar, or the performers who play them, against Abraham and God, or the actor and the director, but there is an antifeminist suggestion in the assumption that a woman is wisest to give up priestly power or theatrical fame to bear a child...

...Gillian's sad wife-sad husband speech recalls, to the marked disadvantage of the later play, Martha's repeated, "George and Martha: sad, sad, sad...

...I can imagine Albee grumpily wondering why I insist on talking about his other plays when I am ostensibly reviewing Marriage Play...

...The biblical story, as we get it here, defines Sarah as the power figure in the community, the priest of a matriarchal religion which is replaced by the traditional Hebrew one when Abraham—just a Jewish businessman until then—becomes a patriarch when he is willing to kill Isaac at God's command...

...Tobias and Agnes have relatives and neighbors and a sense of dis-ease that makes their anguish less hermetic than the conversation pit of Marriage Play...

...It is a long, one-act play in which Jack's announcement that he is leaving Gillian—delivered three times after repeated entrances—is the trigger for a two-character conversation about a marriage that for thirty years has survived infidelity, familiarity, and boredom...

...Too much, perhaps...

...She has a speech in which she catalogues her wifely duties which include comforting him when he needs it, and the final joining of hands may be seen as more of the same—her consoling him on the fact that his declaration of revolutionary escape is never more than empty words...

...It takes place in a regional theater, not quite the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which commissioned the play and first presented it in some form although the George Street production is billed as a world premiere...

...Although she is hardly as old as the barren Sarah was when she bloomed and gave birth to Isaac, the actress is presumably at a last-chance age...

...Jack is a wimp, wimpily played by Tom Klunis...

...But it is essentially pedestrian and—in terms of plot and character—does not add up to much...

...It is probably an unnecessary quibble to point out that an engagement in the regionaltheater series at the Joyce, which is where they are booked, is not likely to ring bells in New York for this biblical folderol—judging by what we see of it—let alone make a star of Abraham...

...even their imaginary child has more substance than the children of Jack and Gillian, who exist only in one line of the play...

...Sarah, the sustaining presence in the theater, loses Abraham, her ambitious husband, to Hagar, a former company member come back from Hollywood success to play this role...

...Similarly, the actor, who has always been a minor figure alongside his wife, attains stature through the director's demands on him, and is presumably ready for the success in the big world that his wife foregoes...

...In a note in the program Albee makes a point of disassociating Marriage Play from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...A good bad marriage, barely sustained again, in the best Albee tradition...

...There are occasional echoes of Virginia Woolf in Marriage Play...

...Jack and Gillian have no context except the playing space—a minimally furnished elegant white set by Derek McLane—and the marriage, about which we hear a great deal, is little more than a verbal construct...

...Jack and Gillian seem much closer to Tobias and Agnes in A Delicate Balance, but their "suburban home" is farther along the road away from the verisimilitude that shares space with the dramatic metaphor of Virginia Woolf than the more accurately labeled "suburban house" of Balance...

...So what do we have here...

...Of course, they are not, and the differences are a lot more central to the two plays than are the cosmetic ones Albee mentions...

...Sarah and Abraham is also about a marriage coming apart, but there is much more than that to the play...

...Shirley Knight's Gillian is much more forceful...

...GERALD WEALES Commonweal10 April 1992: 19...

...There are some funny lines, some brief rhetorical niceties, an occasional extended aria (Gillian's fiction about the artist who killed himself for love of her), and it is easy to listen to since Albee writes listenable lines...

...in response to the people, whoever they are, who ask if Jack and Gillian are "like George and Martha...

...In the second act, the device becomes ponderous, Sarah and Abraham never achieving the transcendence that the play requires...

...Although the serious intentions of the play are obvious from the beginning, the play works best in the first act when the role-performer connections are largely comic...

...Marriage Play, a co-production with the Alley Theatre in Houston, directed by the author, is the American premiere of a work first performed at Vienna's English Theatre in 1987...

...The director is God, of course, and also the father of the child which Sarah chooses to have at the expense of a chance for success in New York...

...The fictional theater is an improvisational one in which the company, with the help of a biblical expert, is working-up the story of Sarah and Abraham, and in which the private lives of the performers echo those of the characters they play...

...Perhaps, but he did name his characters Jack and Jill and the intended image may be of their forever falling down hill, the pail always waterless...

...George and Martha live in an identifiable context and share a marriage that is as fulfilling as it is destructive...

...Jack and Gillian—particularly Gillian—tease the language, worrying over the correct word, 18: 10 April 1992 Commonweal the correct pronunciation, the correct sentence structure, as though style were all, but there is nothing in Marriage Play to equal the precision of Agnes's opening speech in A Delicate Balance...

...STAGE COMING APART 'MARRIAGE' & 'SARAH & ABRAHAM' Plays by Marsha Norman and Edward Albee, not yet performed in New York, have recently had premieres elsewhere along the Amtrak line— Norman's Sarah and Abraham at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, Albee's Marriage Play at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton...

...Norman has a number of ideas afloat and afoot in Sarah and Abraham...