Albee over

Tiny Alice looms large in Hartford

by Carolyn Clay

TINY ALICE, By Edward Albee. Directed by Mark Lamos. Set design by John Arnone. Costumes by Constance Hoffman. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by David Budries. With Gerry Bamman, Tom Lacy, Richard Thomas, John Michael Higgins, and Sharon Scruggs. At Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut, through June 21.

Jesus said, "In my house there are many mansions." In the mansion of Tiny Alice, there is another mansion -- an intricate replica of the one in which most of the action is set. Inside the smaller mansion, we are led to believe, is a replica of it. The question is whether what's in the replicas, perhaps diminishing toward infinity, is more real than what we see; whether, in fact, what we see is a surrogate for an abstraction -- God or, as She's called here, Alice -- that is the ultimate reality. Scratching your head yet? That's because Jesus was a more straightforward guy than Edward Albee, whose 1964 parable Tiny Alice -- which does indeed contain a Christ figure -- is at once thumpingly obvious and deliberately obscure.

Come to think of it, the resuscitation of Albee's career in the wake of the Pulitzer-winning Three Tall Women constitutes a second coming of sorts. There was a 1996 Lincoln Center revival of A Delicate Balance and an entire Signature Theatre season devoted to Albee. Now, at the playwright's suggestion, director Mark Lamos gives us another look at Tiny Alice, in a bang-up Hartford Stage production starring one-time Walton Richard Thomas as Brother Julian, the sometime apostate who is lured into the tender trap of Alice and her agents, in exchange for a $2 billion gift to the Catholic Church. (Add to the usually-listed influences on Tiny Alice, which include Plato, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Jean Genet, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit.)

This is the fourth Hartford Stage collaboration between Lamos, who was the theater's artistic director from 1980 to 1997, and Thomas, following Hamlet, Peer Gynt, and Richard III. And apart from the fact that sacrificial lamb Julian takes longer to shuffle off this mortal coil than Hamlet does to make up his mind, it's a sharply delineated, exquisitely theatrical event. The notoriously exacting playwright having had a hand in the revival, judicious trimming of the third act -- in which Julian is abandoned to Alice, to experience the goddesshead or delude himself that he does -- was doubtless not an option. Albee, then 36, was forced at the time of the play's debut into radical cuts that he restored in the published edition. Now an eminence, he would not likely suffer such amputation, however advisable, again.

As for Tiny Alice, it lives up to the controversy it engendered in 1964, when the original Broadway production starred John Gielgud as Julian and Irene Worth as Miss Alice. A metaphysical mystery with homosexual undertones, the play is archly imaginative, annoyingly overblown, and not entirely explicable.

A Cardinal is approached by a disdainful Lawyer, a man he knew (Biblically and otherwise) when both were at school. In a glintingly waspish opening gambit, the Lawyer offers the Church a potful of money from a fabulously wealthy woman in exchange for lay brother Julian, the Cardinal's private secretary (and probable lust object). Julian is duly dispensed to the mansion to take care of the "odds and ends" of the deal. There, it appears, moneybags Miss Alice lives with the Lawyer and a Butler named Butler, both of whom have been her -- and each other's -- lovers. In this atmosphere of polymorphous perversity, Miss Alice sets out to seduce Julian, an innocent who has been targeted for the fragility of his faith ("Man's God and mine are not one") and a tendency to confuse sexual and religious ecstasy.

But things are not what they seem. It becomes increasingly evident that Miss Alice is controlled by, rather than in control of, the Lawyer and that all three inhabitants of the mansion are agents of a mysterious "tiny" Alice -- "the mouse in the model" -- who wants Julian as her bridegroom (an intriguing gender switch on brides of Christ). At one point a fire breaks out in the model and in the mansion, whereupon the surrogate Alice falls to her knees and prays, paradoxically, to "let us not be consumed" and to "let it all come down." Whatever is going on here, the bewildered Julian is finally alone, at the mercy of whatever -- signified by a thunderous heartbeat -- comes.

The good news is that, at Hartford Stage, even the most stilted and inscrutable incantations and conundrums are attacked with conviction. Thomas is a graceful and intelligent actor who has refused to be chained, à la Prometheus, to Walton's Mountain. As Julian, he bears a modesty that flickers through the play's oft-florid language, and he makes even the grand gesture natural. The stunning Sharon Scruggs, so successfully androgynous in Slaughter City at ART, is a full-out predatory vamp here, until she develops qualms about playing Spider Woman to the affecting Julian's fly. As the Lawyer, Renaissance man of the theater Gerry Bamman (in addition to being an actor, he has translated seven Ibsen plays) is sinister and efficient as the Lawyer; John Michael Higgins brings the right ironic insouciance to the Judas figure Butler; and Tom Lacy marries pomp to seaminess as the Cardinal. Given such a handsome and respectful rendering, it's easier to peg the size of Tiny Alice. She's the brainchild of a large talent bowing to even larger pretensions.