Seascape

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

What if, after living a full life, getting married, raising the kids, setting the alarm, getting up and going to work, doing more of the expected and have to’s rather than what is really wanted, the time you thought would never arrive, when the alarm could be ignored, the kids are adults doing their own have to’s, and you will soon have the time to do what you thought you wanted all along? The problem, however, you have been so busy being busy, you never had time to think about what you really want to do?

Nancy (Billie McBride) and Charlie (John Ashton) share a tender moment on the beach in a scene from Modern Muse Theatre Company’s Seascape

What if?

And what if the time you were busy doing what you had to, your life became so predicable, your comfort zone so comfortable with ivy creeping over the comfort zone doorway. You have nearly forgotten there is a door, much less having any idea where the key to the door is; much less forgetting there ever was a key.

And there you were facing retirement?

What if?

In his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Edward Albee addresses these all too common issues along with relationship, home, and family questions in Seascape.

Modern Muse Theatre Company opened Seascape at the Bug Theatre playing through April 15. Directed by Stephen J. Lavezza and Gabriella Cavallero, Seascape sports a knockout cast featuring Billie McBride, John Ashton, Geoffrey Kent, and Anne Penner.

Cloaked in gentle humor, and surprising wit with recognizable human nature, the unexpected not only tears away the ivy from the hidden comfort zone doorway, but breaks the pot in the process where the key lived all along. The comfort zone threatens pushing the door wide open. Through the gentle laughter come probing, mind bending questions that everyone has to answer sooner or later. There they are drinking in the sun on a gorgeous beach in Somewhere USA. Nancy (McBride) dabbles at a painting while Charlie (Ashton) stretches out on a blanket mixing sun with a lazy snooze.

“Can’t we stay here forever?” Nancy asks Charlie. “No,” Charlie eventually responds. “It would be cold in the winter.” Not deterring Nancy in the slightest, she thinks out loud about traveling from beach to beach around the world. There is nothing holding them back from drinking in the sun, always surrounded by water seeing the world. Charlie remains in his lazy state of mind, unimpressed. He wants to do nothing. “We’ve earned a little rest,” he repeats several times, hardly impressing Nancy even in the slightest.

She wants to know what he wants to do? He wants to know what she wants?

He remembers as a little boy, breathing out all the air and sinking to the bottom of the shallow end of a swimming pool and just sitting there. As a 12-year-old, he would tie large rocks to his legs to sink to the bottom of the ocean, never far from the beach, sitting there as long as he could. She remembers once wanting to be a pony, but never for very long.

She wants to know if the fish ever talked to him. “Sometimes,” he responds. Try as she might to get him to do it again. “Be young again,” she encourages. He won’t.

She recalls there was a week once when she was 30, she toyed with divorcing him. He didn’t know. At the time, she thought it was over between the two of them. “It went away,” she mused, “and you came back.”

They wander haphazardly through their life of he being a good husband. She takes his “had a good life” in offense, because it sounds to her like her life is over. He gets his feelings hurt because she refers to him as a good husband most of the time. Semantics trip them up.

Through Albee’s playful brilliant writing, it is clear Nancy and Charlie have indeed lived a good life. They love each other. It’s clear to the audience. The two, however, have lost the art of conversation and the art of listening.

While they mingle their emotions with mangled queries as two bored middle-aged people, the unexpected shakes them to their roots.

A strange green lizard creature peers over the rocks. While still reeling from what Charlie and Nancy think they saw, two green lizards appear.

Kevin Copenhaver designed the costumes. Charlie and Nancy wear exactly what one would expect a middle-aged couple on a beach to wear. The lizard costumes for Leslie (Kent) and Sarah (Penner) are magnificent as the two slide and slither their way around the stage with the smooth silky grace of two green lizards.

Convinced, the hallucination is from the liver paste Nancy insisted on using for sandwiches, Charlie goes after her for not bringing the chicken they had, which she only retorts he would have dropped it in the sand.

Both couples are afraid of what they see. Both couples have reason to be. Nancy encourages Charlie to roll over on his back in an animal like submissive position. Sarah stands on Leslie’s back having no idea what Charlie and Nancy are doing; a wonderful scene, a very funny scene, wonderfully choreographed to the music of the unfamiliar.

Two different species wanting to be friends, not knowing how, wanting to trust, not knowing how. Everything each pair takes for granted now becomes a major challenge of communication.

The major challenge becomes out right hysterical. Charlie’s explanation of shaking hands is worth the price of the ticket. The lizards have four legs wanting to know why Nancy and Charlie distinguish between their four appendages with arms and legs. Dumbfounded, Charlie looks at his hands. Leslie asks Charlie what frightens him. In awesome awareness, Charlie responds, “immortality. Nancy not being with me, and green things that crawl out of the sea.” Awareness of what they mean to each other begins to slowly sink under the surface between Charlie and Nancy. Ashton and McBride’s under current proficiency in the revelation is a masterful piece of art. Kent and Penner’s lizard graceful “evolution” creates an open mouth and stunned eyes.

On the beach setting designed by Michael Morgan makes it easy to believe the sea lies just on the other side of the rocks along with Sound Engineer Andrew Vastola’s wave crashing noises, squawking seagulls, and noisy airplanes which Nancy finds bothersome and Charlie is convinced one of these days the planes will crash smack into the sand dunes.

There they are, the four having to begin from scratch to explain what they have taken for granted all too long.

Boredom takes a walk for Charlie and Nancy as the four fly from tingling emotions of uneasiness, fear, mistrust, anxiety, and uncertainty, facing the unknown in eager trepidation.

Why did Leslie and Sarah decide to come out of the sea now? What is their life like? How can they understand evolution when they haven’t been through it? Charlie sat on the bottom of the sea, close to the beach because? Where do the hurt misunderstood feelings come from? And how to handle the flight or fright syndrome? Everything so new to both couples. All of a sudden the mundane has no place in any of their lives. Both species have to think carefully about everything that is said.

Wouldn’t it be grand if we all had that experience for 24 hours? What a difference it would make. Actually, we do in communicating with our animals that definitely have a complicated language requiring our listening over against our telling. We have the opportunities beyond goo-gooing and gaa-gaaing to babies, and we have the opportunity between cultures as well as Eastern thinking verses Western thinking.

Albee wrote Seascape in 1974. The further technology worms its way into our lives, and the more complicated communication becomes, the more relevant Seascape becomes. No wonder it won the Pulitzer Prize for its brilliant universal insightfulness, providing obvious reasons to laugh and at the same time tickle the mind to think and wonder simultaneously.

Just don’t miss this production. It speaks through the stunning cast of Ashton, McBride, Kent, and Penner and the Cavallero’s subtle, cohesive, creative direction.