Alice in Underhand
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Alice In Underhand SCENE : A deserted 41st Street outside the Billy Rose Theater, 20 minutes after the performance. Messrs. DIMH and WHIT, arguing hotly, are ejected...
...So are his hallucinations...
...It's the masochism bit all over again...
...WHIT: Its moral level...
...WHIT: That joke had cosmic significance...
...When Irene Worth faces away from the audience and drops her negligee off her shoulders-incidentally, I wonder how that scene looks from the wings or through a hole in back of the set-and Sir John Gielgud plunges into her thighs with a hop, step, and a sob...
...Martyrdom will purify him...
...What is this -Logic, Semester One...
...You must admit that it was a brilliant dramatic device to have the scale model of the house they were in visible onstage...
...They don't pickle it in a Mason jar or anything...
...The kind of line a self-respecting playwright would pencil out when he reads through the first draft...
...He sees this mad woman who thinks she's the Virgin Mary...
...It's the people in the play, not me, who keep asking, "But don't you understand...
...It's a play on "all is...
...WHIT: Albee isn't preaching a course of action...
...What's his name -Jerry-runs onto the knife the other guy is holding out and staggers offstage shouting "Oh my God" in capital letters...
...WHIT: No, sir...
...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Alice In Underhand SCENE : A deserted 41st Street outside the Billy Rose Theater, 20 minutes after the performance...
...DIMH: The church in the form of a Cardinal in a blood-red gown accepts the dough in a very good-looking attache case, in return for Julian's soul (or faith...
...DIMH: Might have been easier all around if he committed suicide...
...Okay, why...
...She stands in for God-Alice...
...Martyrdom is the highest service...
...He has this dream, right...
...while all the time they're wrapping up a few cliches in gauzy talk and making mystic capital out of them...
...Alice is all...
...WHIT: Not fer...
...He's telling you that this is the way things are...
...And then there was, "His Eminence is an eminent man...
...be-cause he knows Julian is celibate...
...Sex is equated here with religion...
...His obsession to serve is masochistic...
...Albee is saying that there's no salvation...
...The kiss is a token of At that moment a cop, who has been watching DIMH and WHIT suspiciously, strolls over with his hand on his revolver, and tells them to move...
...DIMH: I got that line...
...Now, the church, either the Catholic Church or some other church WHIT: Or some other institution or all institutions...
...I don't get it...
...And he's telling you poetically...
...To start with, the theme is futility...
...DIMH: It was...
...Where did it all come from...
...Or take the first words John Gielgud says to Irene Worth: "How do you do...
...WHIT: Not entirely yet...
...Either ill-gotten gains or well-gotten gains...
...If you make the necessary sacrifice, you find your-self forsaken...
...Boy, I'd hate to pay for that scenery...
...DIMH: Some play...
...WHIT: A spiritual orgasm, too...
...No, they put a bullet in his gizzard and leave him to talk himself to death...
...WHIT: Let's start again...
...Don't forget the innuendoes...
...DIMH: I don't say I don't under-stand it...
...She thinks she's bearing the Son of God...
...DrMH: Who can't...
...Somebody in the row behind me said two billion was too much...
...WHIT: That's DIMH: Exactly the point...
...The Irene Worth character, Tiny Alice, is Her surrogate...
...When the show closes they ought to make a diorama out of that model and donate it to the Natural History Museum...
...WHIT: I'm still on the moral level...
...How about dramatically...
...But while we're talking about dramatic devices, I'll point out that there are five gimmicks used for shorthand effects in plays nowadays and I'm good and sick of everyone of them: the pistol or knife, the slap, the liquor cabinet, the cigarette, and the repetition of a word or phrase, getting louder and louder...
...DIMH and WHIT, arguing hotly, are ejected from the lobby by a doorman...
...Its attack on the evils of money...
...But I don't see that it takes two billion to buy a man's soul these days...
...He longs to be clawed open by a lion in a Roman arena or to feel a gladiator's trident breaking into his body...
...He approaches her...
...DIMH: Name one...
...DIMH: That's another business I didn't get...
...DIMH: You're asking me...
...WHIT: It's quite straightforward...
...WHIT: At any rate, you're over-looking the play's obvious merits...
...Let a feller who wants to do good do it because it's a good act, not for the sake of some reward in dollars or in heaven...
...First Neville Shute writes a novel about a town named Alice...
...Could be that Alice isn't God, after all, but the devil...
...Well, I'll say this much for Tiny Alice-there's no slap in it...
...Let's face it, John Gielgud wasn't such a buy...
...WHIT: And a high wind pouring through them and the last thudding of the blood in you before it finally coagulates...
...DIMH: So what...
...Live it up while there's time...
...For him martyrdom is not an ending but a beginning, a climax that would introduce him to the station of a saint: "After martyrdom a saint begins to live.' If she and the lawyer and the butler (Alice's minions) can destroy him, they're destroying more than a man...
...Gratuitous sacrifice recurs through-out Albee's work...
...You can't get close to God any more than you can to a woman...
...And she replies, "How do I do what...
...WHIT: Wait...
...But suddenly-boom-ejaculation...
...For 200 a week Never mind...
...WHIT: You've got it wrong...
...WHIT: His dream won't bear fruit until after he's been martyred...
...One is a metaphor for the other...
...Here, the character winds up shouting "Oh my Alice...
...I mean, I don't call that original, echoing himself...
...WHIT: When he doesn't get something, calls it pretentious or confused...
...DIMH: Poetically...
...DIMH: It gives him an orgasm...
...DIMH: But that's like the end of The Zoo Story...
...I've done it...
...WHIT: You're the type of per-son who, when he doesn't under-stand DIMH: I said "get...
...We're a matriarchal society, okay...
...WHIT: . I told you: he can't get close to a woman...
...WHIT: That's exactly the point...
...DIMH: Fertility...
...WHIT: That's the other important level...
...They both mean, "Let me out...
...He will "go bloodstained and upward,' his arms out, like a mutilated cross...
...Then they find out she only has cancer of the womb...
...It really is an hallucination, not a dream at all...
...She's lying on a grassy bank or a mossy verge surrounded by a fog of milk or a milky fog or, what the hell, gaseous sperm...
...Suicide is a sin...
...For instance, when Tiny Alice says, "Is the memory of something having happened the same as something having happened...
...So is his will to martyrdom...
...But a kiss is a pretty feeble sort of slap...
...Or when Julian goes into the chapel and comes back to report that "Spiders are busy about the altar and the organ is in need of use," and the lawyer answers, "Hm...
...You may have thought that was merely a joke...
...Tell me some other levels...
...DIMH: He's pure, the poor creep...
...Other men I know have done it...
...DIMH: With you everything's exactly the point...
...It seemed to me he got pretty close...
...WHIT: That's exactly the point...
...It's an illusion, just as the dream of fulfillment in sex is an illusion...
...DIMH: You plant a seed and up comes a heavy growth of Graham Greenery...
...DIMH: Oh, Alice WHIT: All right, take the word Alice...
...There's no after-life, Albee explains, only an immense yearning for one...
...They've been chewed to death by the reviewers...
...He was clasping his hands and making cathedral spires with his fingers and talking in that beautiful tea-strainer voice, but two billion takes a lot of saving...
...You remember how'often" Julian said, "I want to serve...
...Whoever said it was...
...He's wandering through this glade...
...You lie and die and all you're aware of is the open doors behind you DIMH: Seventeen feet high...
...DIMH: Foo...
...WHIT: Its levels of meaning...
...WHIT: You don't understand that...
...We all know the devil's loaded...
...DIMH: A female God...
...God is all...
...When there was the fire in the chapel you could see a miniature fire in the chapel of the model...
...Now this guy Albee has a play about a God called Tiny Alice...
...Hence the futility...
...But what do Tiny Alice and her cohorts -the lawyer who keeps twisting her heart and her wrist and her butler, whose name is Butler-want with Julian's soul (or faith...
...Do nothing...
...Didn't you...
...How does God do any-thing...
...DIMH: I'm dead set against money, like everybody else who doesn't have much of it...
...If God is all, man is nothing...
...There were several other lines I did not get...
...The character of Julian is soaked in masochism...
...WHIT: That's exactly the point...
...WHIT: A simple play on words...
...I've never seen a bigger or finer model...
...DIMH: Me, I wrote off salvation when I was about 15...
...I'd sure hate to foot the cost of it, though...
...Next level...
...WHIT: That's exactly the point...
...The same goes for another line: "People are not what other people say they are...
...DIMH: Such as...
...DIMH: I still don't get it...
...WHIT: Alice wants Julian be-cause he's told her about his propensity to martyrdom...
...They descend into the IRT subway, still at odds...
...God is called Alice...
...Maybe...
...But a matriarchal universe...
...We have this Julian, a lay brother-and, brother, that's some ripe pun considering he first gets laid and then laid off-who's sold by the church to this very affluent lady, a one-woman foundation WHIT: Who also represents the State, or modern organized life, voluntary and involuntary associations...
...There is something like a slap, when Butler the butler kisses Julian as he's dying, and then abandons him...
...It's too much...
...DIMH: Some time later she's pregnant...
...DIMH: It was a smashing model...
...DIMH: The lay brother is sold for two billion bucks...
...DIMH: Have you heard me use either of those words...
...I wouldn't go near them...
...WHIT: You find the metaphor expressed in its tautest form when Tiny Alice says, "Shall I spread my legs for the clergy...
...Well, let that pass...
...And how about at the end of Act Two there...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
