‘Seascape’ returns Edward Albee to center stage at the Alley Theatre
Lauded playwright and college professor felt Houston was his artistic home
When Rob Melrose was at Princeton University in the early ’90s, he worked on a production of Edward Albee’s “Marriage Play,” a co-production of the university’s McCarter Theatre and Houston’s Alley Theatre. It had such a lasting impact that, decades later when he applied to be the Alley’s artistic director, he led with his experiences with Albee.
“He just raved about the Alley,” says Melrose, who got the job and took over in the fall of 2019. “He just talked about it as his artistic home. It was a place where he was able to do his old plays, his new plays. He was able to direct some of his favorite authors there.”
Albee, who died in September 2016 at age 88, is widely regarded as one of the — if not the — preeminent American playwrights of the post-World War II era, thanks to works such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?,” “A Delicate Balance,” “The Zoo Story,” “Three Tall Women” and many others. His caustic wit and piercing insight into everyday relationships repeatedly set new benchmarks for drama, as did his versatility; few others could veer from naturalism to absurdism and back again so deftly.
He also had an indelible connection to Houston and to the Alley, which opened Albee’s “Seascape” on Oct. 14. From 1967 to 2003, the theater produced 14 Albee plays, including “Virginia Woolf ” twice, making him its most-produced playwright besides William Shakespeare. Two of them, “The Play About the Baby” and “Marriage Play” — the same co-production Melrose worked on in New Jersey — were U.S. premieres. Besides those, Albee himself directed several others, including “The Death of Bessie Smith” and “Counting the Ways” in 1986.
When the Alley won the regional-theater award at the 1996 Tonys, Albee presented the award.
Albee also served as the distinguished professor of playwriting at the University of Houston between 1989 and
2003, and again between 2010-11. He was a gracious and generous colleague, remembers Rob Shimko, head of UH’s school of theater and dance. Shimko once asked Albee to sit in on a survey course of his; the resulting “Virginia Woolf ” discussion left a roomful of impressed sophomores reflecting, “I knew he taught here, but I never thought I’d meet him,” Shimko recalls.
In return, Albee wanted Shimko to add a Thornton Wilder play to his syllabus because, says Shimko, “he and Thornton Wilder were close.”
Shimko also wrote the text for “Alley Theatre: 75 Years,” a limited-edition hardcover published earlier this year to celebrate the theater’s diamond anniversary. Albee features prominently in several passages, including the following reflection by Paul Tetreault, the Alley’s managing director from 1994-2004.
“He wanted you to think he was ‘difficult’ — the truth is, he cared about the Alley Theatre deeply and took great pride in his position as an Associate Artist,” Tetreault tells Shimko. “He held our feet to the fire and demanded that we live up to our reputation as the most important theatre in the Southwest.”
Prickly as his plays could be, Albee himself was decidedly down to earth. Shimko remembers a remarkable evening when the two men went to see a traveling cat circus together — a “wild experience,” he remembers.
“He stuck around at the end and wanted to talk to the cat trainers, and they had no idea who he was,” says Shimko. “They didn’t know they were talking to this three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and he was just asking about, ‘How do you store the cats when they travel? Do you feed them? What’s the training regimen like?’
“Anything he did was very sincere, and he was fairly spontaneous,” Shimko continues. “He liked what he liked, and if he was interested in something, he would pursue it very vigorously.”
In 2003, the Alley simultaneously presented “Virginia Woolf ” and the very recent “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” a priceless moment that juxtaposed probably Albee’s bestknown play with one that emphatically demonstrated he had hardly lost his edge. (To sum up, a successful architect falls head over heels with the titular type of livestock.)
“Seascape,” winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, will be the Alley’s first Albee play since then. Despite its fantastical premise — as an older couple walks along a beach, a pair of reptilian humanoids walk out of the ocean and start shooting the breeze — Shimko, the production’s dramaturge, says it’s still recognizably Albee.
“As we’ve been spending time with it, it is as sort of emotionally true and is sort of realistically dropped in to human experience as anything else that he’s ever written,” he says.
Despite the two couples being of different species, “It’s two married couples having a conversation,” Shimko continues, “and two married couples having a conversation is something that Edward wrote about often, probably better than just about anybody else — you know, that sort of long afternoon or long evening where two married couples just push each other’s buttons until the truth starts coming out. That was the thing he did better than any other American playwright.”
Bringing Albee back to the Alley was among Melrose’s top priorities when he took over. He’d love to do more. To him, Albee belongs on the Mount Rushmore of American dramatists — right up there with Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson — and no theater has a better right to sing Albee’s praises than his own.
“The fact that he’s done so many plays over so many years at the Alley, I feel like he adds a level of seriousness and a level of credibility to the Alley,” Melrose says. “I think a theater that’s done so many of his plays is obviously concerned with great literature and great theater, and I think it’s a signal to the world that this is a theater that values great writers.”
“The fact that he’s done so many plays over so many years at the Alley, I feel like he adds a level of seriousness and a level of credibility to the Alley.”
Rob Melrose,
Alley Theatre artistic director