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still bear names from the dramatis personae of
The Cocktail Party
or
The Family Reunion;
and they speak-when they are not speaking of
"fags" and "copping out"-a preposterous and occasionally illiterate
imitation of Eliot. Even their thoughts are not their own, and Albee's
grudging admiration for the delicate balance Agnes manages to arrange
is sheer literary affectation. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly's dispiriting c,on–
ception of marriage and the good life cannot possibly bear such weight
in Albee's own view.
Albee's exposition of the threats to Agnes' sense of order is overly
explicit and dramatically redundant. Agnes entertains the possibility
(although Jessica Tandy and Albee do not convince us of the possibility)
that she may one day go mad. Meanwhile a steely equilibrium is en–
forced in her present life. She overlooks her husband's occasional in–
fidelities, contains her sister's inebriated aggressions and endures her
daughter's disastrous marriages. This delicate balance is almost upset
by Harry and Edna, Agnes and Tobias' best friends, who experience
a nameless "fear" and seek refuge in the bedroom Agnes maintains for
Julia's homecomings. It is all the same to Albee whether Harry and
Edna have experienced fear, anxiety, terror or The Plague,
if,
indeed,
he distinguishes among them. He is plainly more interested in staging
yet another, and still cruder, version of Get The Guests: Julia threatens
Harry and Edna with a gun. Order is restored when Harry and Edna,
accepting a Kantian argument in a Kierkegaardian situation, find that
they must withdraw, and the curtain falls as Agnes, framed by the
classical arches of her sitting room, delivers a speech that delicately
balances the one on which the curtain rose. Its exhausted imagery and
grammatical perversities will give some sense of Albee's widely-praised
literary achievement. "What I find most astonishing-aside from my
belief that I will, one day ... lose my mind ...-but when? Never, I
begin to think, as the years go by, or that I'll
know
if
it happens, or
maybe even has-what I find most astonishing I think, is the wonder
of daylight, of the sun. ... When the daylight comes again ... comes
order with it."
Edna and Harry are not friends from across the way but refugees
from some absurdist drama, and dramatic logic ordains that they will
not make sense in Agnes and Harry's suburban home. The audience
may feel that new metaphysical realms have been penetrated when
Harry makes the Heideggerian suggestion that the terror struck after
"nothing happened." But the ethical and psychological consequences of
this metaphysical calamity cannot be explored in the impenetrably em–
pirical atmosphere of Agnes' living room. Moving in with a friend in
