Torture Chamber Music

...like a genuine painter, he achieved compositions that were as picturesque as they were natural...

...The question is merely whether Albee hates as wisely as he hates well...

...like a veritable cinematographer, he coaxed infinite multiplicity and fluidity of action into a mere box set...

...ferociously holds one's interest during its long running time, and insidiously occupies one's imagination for a long fermenting time afterward...

...Compare it with two other plays about four people with which it has much in common, Look Back in Anger and Long Day's Journey Into Night, and some striking differences appear...

...It all sounds as if Albee felt obliged to introduce a conciliatory element without himself believing in it...

...Unlike Osborne's and O'Neill's people, Albee's enjoy their beastliness-it is, in fact, their only joy...

...It is a complete performance...

...And however great his expertise, not for a moment did it call attention to itself at the expense of the play...

...Though it sometimes lapses into hipsterism or compulsive repetition of a phrase, it is generally literate without being literary, real without being ploddingly realistic...

...For the play, hard and gemlike as it is, often emits more smoke than flame...

...George Grizzard's by turns sulkily puzzled and swaggeringly jolly biologist was, within the somewhat limited range of the part, a clean, economical, controlled piece of workmanship...

...The talk is accurate, biting, often devilishly amusing, and sometimes even shockingly sad...

...instead of burning, it is apt only to besmirch...

...Albee's play is written out of hatred...

...After all this, I need hardly say that Albee's play is easily the most imposing achievement of the season so far and one which it will not be easy to equal...

...His collection of essays, Acid Test, will be published in the spring by Stein and Day...

...Albee invokes a plague on both houses, showing the historian and his wife, an older order, as corroded by cynicism and destructiveness as the new order, the biologist and spouse, is besotted by crass positivism, hysteria or greed...

...What happens when a jaded couple who openly torment each other and anyone else they can get their barbs on spend a progressively more drunken night with a couple who discreetly, amiably deceive each other, forms the substance of the play: four people settling down like fiends to a little game of bitch...

...By contrast, Uta Hagen's performance is a wavering one...

...Neither is the resolution and feeble potential hope at the very end convincing: Ten minutes of truth after 20 years of lying do not even begin to sound hopeful, yet their insertion as a finale is apparently supposed to dignify such precipitous truth into a possible cure...

...There is more that could be asked of drama, no doubt...

...If any of the strictures I am about to make are in the least likely to discourage the reader from attending Edward Albee's new play, I would prefer that he refrain from reading beyond this paragraph...

...John Simon, guest theater critic for this issue, has written for Hudson Review, Theater Arts and the New Republic...

...then they must torture their audience...

...All that was needed was popcorn and hot dog vendors hawking their wares up and down the aisles...

...Though this does not seem to me to be an appropriate picture of the world we live in (unless it is assumed that there is something prudential or pedagogic about overstatement), it does not constitute a dramatic flaw...

...What is, however, faulty dramaturgy is that the ultimate revelation in the third act is not believable, nor is it dramatically climactic...

...But in the shaky third act, for instance, she was often poignantly, unswervingly true...

...As his harmlessly harmful wife, the engaging Melinda Dillon was exactly and hilariously right wherever superlative cabaret technique was sufficient, but in the emotionally more taxing sequences she remained somewhat sketchy...

...This sounds painfully simple, but it is not: it is simply agonizing...

...If Grizzard did not always succeed in getting the exact shade of bewilderment called for, he did splendidly with the entire spectrum from cocky, crapulous self-appreciation to spitefulness and ultimate disgust...

...The night I attended, obstreperous and ostentatious applause greeted every broader and less funny joke, obliterating bits of dialogue and dissipating much of the mood and impact...

...But this is not, in itself, reprehensible...

...Not the least delight of the evening was Alan Schneider's direction, no less imaginative in its variety than impeccable in its detail...

...Particularly a certain strut of hers, like that of a penguin trying to imitate Boris Karloff, seemed offensive to me...

...Hill is never so much in love with his art that he fudges his technique, never so much of a sheer technician as to obliterate human credibility...

...Like an expert conductor, Schneider elicited the most subtly diverse tempos and harmonies...

...But Albee's characters are either completely deluded or completely disillusioned, and what infinitesimal sympathy they can muster seems no more than a rest period enabling them presently to hack and claw all the better...

...The only objection I might have is that he did not sit sufficiently on Miss Hagen...

...it may, indeed, be therapeutic, in the sense that Nietzsche, Lautr?©amont or Henry Miller can be said to be so...

...For though the younger couple are quite satisfied to hide their discontent-he behind bluff opportunism, she behind placidly bibulous scatterbrainedness-the elder couple have for their lar the Marquis de Sade, for their penate SacherMasoch, and worship their household gods with human sacrifice...

...At a party for new faculty members, the unsuccessful professor's disaffected wife invites over a dapper young biology professor and his childlike wife, fresh from the Middle West, for an after-party foursome...

...hits home most palpably...

...Not only are acts of humor and horror kept alternating with the skill of an experienced ringmaster, but often even, with the efficiency of a Mixmaster, they are thoroughly blended...

...But Albee, at least, has brilliantly arranged the cries of the damned into a dazzling though unstrung quartet, and Schneider has paced it perfectly from first to last disquieting note...

...The acting is, on the whole, far superior to what we get on Broadway, even in plays with small casts...

...Such, in short, is the internecine and misanthropic story, except for a bit of dubious twilight hope at the end of the abrasive night...

...And it is a tribute to Albee's inventiveness and virulent fun that he can keep such a chillingly claustrophobia-producing bit of in-fighting as amusing, as horrible, as stimulating as it is exhausting...

...The play concerns a middle-aged professor of history at a New England college and his wife, the daughter of its president...

...This actor who, very good from the start, manages to grow further with every part, appropriates his role (which must be as long as Hamlet's, and very nearly as demanding) to the point where every movement, every verbal emphasis interlocks perfectly with what precedes and follows in continual echo and foreshadowing, thus creating not only a seamless characterization but also a kind of masterly mechanism which we must admire cog by cog...

...Showing the clash of two social orders, Osborne is at pains to display what is good even in the old, reactionary society, and what is excessive in the new, revolutionary one...

...but for a play to have the control of dialogue, the wit and the indignation of this one, so that even the naked eye can perceive its broadening effect on that narrowness named Broadway, calls, first of all, for our satisfaction and gratitude...

...but it is a pure hatred, in that it discriminates in favor of no one...

...instead of surpassing the preliminary horrors, it falls short of them...

...If Christ could make a claim for the fallen women quia multum amavit, a claim can perhaps be made for the artist fallen on bad times for hating with such great passion...

...And whereas O'Neill's foursome whack away at one another in similar fashion, they still cling to certain ideals, however tattered or false...

...First the hosts must torture each other by playing on each other's weaknesses, but to make it more stinging, they must have an audience...

...Arthur Hill makes the historian a mixture of cold-blooded, intellectual savagery and boyish, almost endearing prankishness that adds up to one of the bravura performances of our day...

...then the audience-the young couple-must fight back and, revealing their own bitterness in the process, end up torturing each other as well...

...Always extremely clever, sometimes squeezing remarkable pathos out of unyielding material, Miss Hagen tends to be coarse above the line of duty and to settle for easy and questionable effects...

...There are also lesser improbabilities, such as the diction of the history professor and his wife: Such people are not likely to throw around "baby" as a universal term of address, nor would they use vulgarisms like "the both of you.' But these are minor cavils, and it is precisely in the area of language that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...For while the characters on stage play such sanguine-sounding but sanguinary games as "Get the Guests" or "Hump the Hostess," the playwright is treating himself to a scarcely less devastating game of "Punch the Public" or "Oppilate the Audience...

...It deserves the large audiences which it has already been getting, though I am not quite sure that the audiences deserve it...

...they still can dig up from the bottoms of their cluttered souls a little compassion, however showy or stilted...