Seascape, a 1975 play by Edward Albee, tries to reach its audience through poetry and symbolism. Nancy and Charlie have had children, grandchildren and rich lives together, and they now find themselves at the edge of old age. Picnicking on a bluff overlooking the sea, they ponder their future. Nancy wants to travel with her husband from beach to beach for the rest of their lives, and hopes that someday, they'll die simultaneously. However, Charlie wants to rest. He's happy to do nothing, a thought that horrifies his wife: Is that what we spent all of our lives for? For nothing?
Roxanne Harley and Roger Owen in Seascape.
The two are forced to look past their petty squabbles when they're unexpectedly confronted with a pair of large lizards—English-speaking lizards, no less—who've just emerged from the sea and are on the cusp of evolving. The lizards, named Sarah and Leslie, take in all the wonders of life on land, and Nancy and Charlie must explain to them, and to themselves as well, why being human is worth the uncertainty and pain.
With human and reptile characters sharing the stage, director Michael Fenlason leads his cast through two distinct styles of acting. Roxanne Harley and Roger Owen portray Nancy and Charlie naturalistically, displaying the comfortable familiarity of two people who have shared a lifetime. Both do an admirable job of speaking through Albee's elliptical dialogue as they lounge across Jared Strickland's beautiful beach-panorama set. On the night I attended, Owen was ill and struggled with his lines in the second act—an easily forgiven shortcoming, considering he was onstage and speaking for the length of the play. Unfortunately, during those few moments, the focus was on the words themselves, and it was the only time that the threads of character and subtext that hold the play together became unclear.
In contrast to the humans' naturalism, Ericka Quintero and Todd Fitzpatrick play the lizards with striking physicality, injecting the play with a jolt of life. As they scramble across the rocks in Kristen Wheeler's lizard-skin costumes, the reptilian details of their movement and the curious, alien delivery of their lines make their performances both surreal and grounded in reality.
Seascape has plenty of humor, but overall, the tone is elegiac, and the small cast and single location gradually make the passing of time itself feel like a tangible, meaningful presence.
