The Westons whale away at each other with unrelenting bitchery for three hours and five minutes. During the evening, various dysfunctions are revealed: alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, pedophilia, even incest. (Surprisingly, no one turns out to be gay, perhaps because the author didn't want to lump homosexuality in with incest, pedophilia, etc.). These revelations are hardly surprising, since the Westons are as screwed-up on the surface as they are underneath.
The play's wished-for ancestors are Long Day's Journey into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it kept reminding me of humbler fare: Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978), another semi-farcical expose of a family's infinite vices, and The Anniversary (1968), in which a cackling Bette Davis puts her grown children through an evening of malevolent hell. Like both of these vehicles, AOC has an inescapably camp tone, and while this serves to keep the sniping tolerable, it also prevents it from going very deep. The dialogue is HBO-sitcom, though none of the laugh lines are actually funny, and the play is studded with would-be aphorisms that are neither funny, clever nor true. In one respect, at least, the author has internalized Albee's vision: all of his men are weak, and most of his women are harpies or cartoons.
The play also works a distinct vein of pretentiousness. An American Indian, symbolic of Those From Whom the Westons Stole the Land, presides over the family's dissolution from an attic perch. Literary name-dropping and quotation--T.S. Eliot, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson--are deployed to make the evening seem important. There is even a ludicrous speech likening the Westons' disharmony to the supposed Decline and Fall of America. (Albee tried something similar in Virginia Woolf, suggesting that George and Martha's squabbling was a phenomenon of Spenglerian proportions).
But while AOC is neither a significant nor a good play, it is not boring either. The camp savagery keeps things humming, and occasionally throws off some genuine sparks--as in the play's best scene, a second-act dinner where the Weston's embittered and cancerous matriarch goads her brood into physical violence. I often walk out on plays, and AOC's double intermissions gave me two opportunities to do so, but I didn't avail myself of either. And there you have the best thing I can say about this celebrated American drama: it didn't drive me out of the theatre. |
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