Seascape

In Edward Albee's Seascape, an old couple played by Frances Sternhagen and George Grizzard chit chat on the beach (a magnificent set by Michael Yeargan), about what is more important at this stage of life: to live or to rest. She's lively, he's depressed. Both are totally convincing, engaging actors.

Enter two talking lizards with great physicality played by Elizabeth Marvel and Frederick Weller, who mirror the dominant wife and subservient husband. It seems to be an allegory about human development, which becomes simplistic rhetoric about prejudice and bigotry. The lizard costumes by Catherine Zuber are sensational, but teaching about life and its lessons in simple talk can get tiring. Grizzard's character has no sense of wonder at the lizards, just his same unmotivated grumpiness. It's all an interesting idea that needs another tangent to really work dramatically.

Subtle lighting changes by Peter Kaczorowski enhance all the proceedings, and director Mark Lamos gives the play verve and energy, but it becomes a description of evolution on a childish level, a schoolroom for naive lizards, and the end, to me, defeats the message (if there really is one). Albee is a bright guy, usually with an ear for believable dialogue and an innate sense of the dramatic, and the play in its entirety does hold an audience, especially with the excellent performances. But as a work trying for philosophic import, it's got a ways to go.