Loss boys

Stephen Rowe introduces Albee's men

by Carolyn Clay

ALBEE'S MEN, Excerpted from the works of Edward Albee. Directed by Glyn O'Malley. Lighting design by O'Malley and Kimberly Scott. Performed by Stephen Rowe. Presented by American Repertory Theatre's ART New Stages at the Hasty Pudding Theatre through April 11.

Life, in Albee's Men, is a vanishing act. In the first piece in the show, from Fragments -- A Concerto Grosso, a young man stares suspiciously into a mirror, convinced that the person peering back is looking through him at someone else, that he himself is disappearing. In Counting the Ways, it is memory that is vanishing, in Marriage Play the armor of unawareness. The compilation's final figure, a man "nicely over 50," describes being more or less ambushed by mindfulness of mortality. One could better deal with this knowledge, he opines, if one were cognizant of "doom" from the beginning -- the irony of Albee's Men being its demonstration that Edward Albee, if not his characters, has been articulately, corrosively aware for four decades that, in the words of The Zoo Story's Jerry, "what is gained is loss."

Albee's Men is an intelligent if not quite a compelling work, a series of vignettes culled by longtime Albee actor Stephen Rowe and director Glyn O'Malley (who was for many years Albee's literary assistant) from the works of the three-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, who has just turned 70. The pieces are presented not in chronological order of their creation but according to the age of the characters, generating in effect a Seven Ages of Albee's Man.

That's a fellow whom many would argue has lived in the shadow of Albee's Woman, from Mommy and Grandma in The American Dream to Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the moribund matriarch of Three Tall Women. Notable exceptions are Jerry of The Zoo Story, thrusting his pain into the lap of a male stranger in Central Park, and the embittered, vitriolic Himself of The Man Who Had Three Arms. Not surprisingly, these are among the showier portraits of Albee's Men, which by and large is less bravura than elegiac. Even the show's younger characters share a sense of resignation to loss; says Finding the Sun's orphan boy-toy Fergus of the unsavory events that have separated him from a relatively happy kept boyhood, "There was nothing for it."

Rowe, a founding member of the American Repertory Theatre company whose recent turns there have included the insouciant chauffeur 'Enry Straker in Man and Superman and the punk Grumio of The Taming of the Shrew, is a smart, subtle actor. On the cusp of 50, he still manages the playful smugness of Fergus and the edgy aggression of Jerry as well as he does the cryptic polish of Virginia Woolf's George (barely nodded to here) or the pompous sorrow and fury of Himself, a lecture-circuit celebrity-freak snapping at the hand that feeds him.

Even without Peter to react, "THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!", from The Zoo Story, is a toothsome set piece, and Rowe understands how Albee, in his stylized works, transfers his own painstaking linguistic precision to even the most unlikely of characters. I also like the way the tale is paralleled in the second part of the program by Tobias's speech, from A Delicate Balance, about a cat whose sudden indifference has proved a betrayal the intensely, if calmly, resentful speaker refuses to endure.

As for The Man Who Had Three Arms, a soupçon of this unpleasant work proves useful for what it says about Albee. Clearly, the playwright poured all his resentment at being written off after the streak of brilliance that stretched from Zoo Story to A Delicate Balance into the supercilious, misogynistic, deeply distressed Himself, whose mysteriously grown and then withered third arm is a rather obvious metaphor. Interestingly, Rowe -- having doffed Jerry's agitation for a scolding, pottier persona -- indicates the ghost of the arm by a flutter of his hand above his head, suggesting plumage.

By and large, Albee's Men conveys the perverse wit, as well as the edge of ache and alienation, that runs through Albee's work. And Rowe seems to take the same, sometimes arbitrary, pleasure in language that the playwright does, stopping, for example, to savor the word "perambulator" or the somewhat alarming image of an old woman leaning into a baby's crib so that "her face fell toward me" (and not just her face; it's preceded by a "pendant-opal the size of a testicle").

At this point in its development, the staging of the piece (which was workshopped last year in California and in Provincetown) is distinctly, and sometimes awkwardly, minimal. Obviously the idea is to put the focus on Albee's men and, more to the point, on Albee's language. But something a bit more imaginative, even conceptual, than Rowe's retreating between pieces to slick back his own hair or tote his own podium, against a blank wall of changing color, wouldn't hurt. Less is not always more, as surely an homage to an acknowledged master of baroque syntax should attest.