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Edward Albee and Maurice Maeterlinck: All Over as Symbolism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

James Neil Harris
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Extract

Edward Albee's play All Over clearly is about death and dying. It is literally a death watch: an unseen man lies dying, surrounded by his wife, mistress, best friend, children, doctor, and nurse; they talk around him and about him; at the end of the play, the man dies. It is a drama, as Richmond Crinkley has observed, ‘in which nothing much happens … a prolonged doldrums, measured by the apocalypses which don't occur, by the conflicts which are never resolved, and by the rhythms which are repetitive rather than dynamic’. Like Albee's earlier avantgarde Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, All Over utilizes an entropic vocabulary, employs similar primary themes and motifs, and gives the nihilistic impression – as its title aptly indicates – of being all over before the action has even begun. Unfortunately, most critics who saw the play's production when All Over opened in New York in March, 1971, applauded Albee's ingenious choice of title – but with an ironic twist. As far as they were concerned, the sooner the play's run was all over the better; All Over was denounced as – to give just a quick sampling – ‘deadly dull’, ‘an arrogant display piece, puffed up with sophomoric diction’, ‘self-indulgent’, ‘a depressing event in an enigmatic career’, and a ‘Death Prattle’.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 200 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1978

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References

Notes

1. Crinkley, Richmond, ‘The Development of Edward Albee’Google Scholar, rev. of All Over, by Albee, Edward, The National Review, 24 01 1967, p. 100.Google Scholar

2. Gussow, Mel, ‘Albee's New “All Over” in Rehearsal’, New York Times, 9 02 1971, p. 32.Google Scholar

3. Walter Kerr wrote that ‘The exercise at the Martin Beck is extraordinarily remote, detached, noncommital’ (New York Times, 4 04 1971, Sec. 2, p. 1); Jack Kroll echoed this objection when he stated that ‘abstraction has the windpipe of the play in a death grip’ (Newsweek, 5 04 1971, p. 52).

4. Clive Barnes noted about Box-Mao-Box that ‘in the 20th century when every art form has moved to the abstract, or at least the impersonal, it is curious how long it is taking the drama to catch up’ (New York Times, 1 10 1968, p. 39). Later, when reviewing All Over, Barnes indirectly refers back to this point when he observes that All Over ‘has been very much influenced by his [Albee's] experiment in theatrical abstraction, Box-Mao-Box’ (New York Times, 29 03 1971, p. 41).

5. Harold Clurman, rev. of All Over, by Albee, Edward, Nation, 12 04 1971, p. 476.Google Scholar

6. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting For Godot, trans, by Beckett, (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 45.Google Scholar Albee has read Godot a number of times and has said publicly that ‘There's no self respecting playwright writing today who hasn't been influenced by Samuel Beckett’ (The New Yorker, 3 06 1974, p. 30). Albee's latest play, Seascape (1975), has also been influenced by Beckett – in this case, Beckett's Happy Days.

7. Albee, Edward, All Over (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 74.Google Scholar All further references to All Over will be given parenthetically, with no abbreviation for title.

8. Albee, Edward, Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (New York: Atheneum, 1969), p. 31.Google Scholar

9. ‘“All Over.” Albee's Drama of Death, Arrives, rev. of All Over, by Albee, Edward, New York Times, 29 03 1971, p. 41.Google Scholar

10. Maurice Maeterlinck, Twayne's World Author Series, No. 342 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), p. 53.

11. Maurice Maeterlinck: A Study of his Life and Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 123–4. This book, because of its singularity as the only full biography of Maeterlinck thus far in English and its date of publication, may well have been read by Albee.

12. Maeterlinck, Maurice, The Treasure of the Humble, trans. Sutro, Alfred (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.; London: George Allen, Ruskin House, 1905), p. 106.Google Scholar All further references will be cited parenthetically, with the abbreviation ‘TofH’.

13. Knapp, , Maurice Maeterlinck, pp. 175–6.Google Scholar

14. Clurman, , p. 477.Google Scholar

15. Barnes, , New York Times, 29 03 1971, p. 41.Google Scholar

16. A Treasury of the Theatre (1935; rpt. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1959), p. 266. The Intruder can be found in this volume.

17. Representative Modern Dramas (1936; rpt. New York: MacMillan, 1958), p. 406.

18. ‘To the Brink of the Grave: Edward Albee's All Over’, in Edward Albee, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bigsby, C. W. E., Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 172.Google Scholar

19. Baxandall, Lee, ‘The Theatre of Edward Albee’, Tulane Drama Review, 9, No. 4 (Summer, 1965), p. 20.Google Scholar Baxandall discusses Albee's generations on pp. 19–40.

20. Albee, Edward, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Atheneum, 1962), p. 41.Google Scholar

21. Halls, , Maurice Maeterlinck: A study of his Life and Thought, p. 164.Google Scholar