TINY ALICE
Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd St. Through Dec. 24.
‘TINY Alice” is “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for pseudo-intellectuals. Edward Albee’s 1964 allegory, slightly tightened up for 2000, is a drama by a writer who doesn’t know what he wants to say except that organized religion is bad, sex is powerful and martyrdom is, well, odd.
It’s a mystery play that’s meant to be an updating of the sort of play represented by T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.”
But Albee hadn’t the intellect, the learning or the temperament to work in this vein, and the ’60s weren’t the right time. He wants to rethink the relation of sex to religion and comes up with gimmick of a nymphomaniac zillionairess reciting a D.H. Lawrence poem to seduce a lay brother. Oh, brother!
In “Tiny Alice,” a Catholic lay brother, Julian, is sent by his cardinal to accept a zillion-dollar donation from a mysterious woman, Alice, who dwells in a forbidding castle.
She impersonates an old lady in greeting him, but soon reveals her sexy, seductive real self. Before long, she is taking off her clothes and he is forgetting his vows. But, on the day when he thinks he’s going to wed her and celebrate with champagne, she and the Cardinal and the other characters – the Lawyer and the Butler – are preparing to scamper off.
The Lawyer shoots Julian and orders him to commune in his last moments with not the actual Alice but with Tiny Alice, a miniature version of her who lives in a doll castle. Waiter, make that a double! This nonsense is occasionally enlivened by bitchy writing of the kind Albee had shown himself master of in “Virginia Woolf.”
As the hapless Julian, Richard Thomas has a bright, open, what-next face that almost makes us sympathetic to his character’s bewilderment.
Laila Robins imparts to Alice a slick, smooth, articulate sexiness, but it’s a theatrical, willed pose that never strikes us as grounded. But this is as much Albee’s fault as Robins’. Tom Lacy looks right as a Cardinal – fleshy, proud, sexually neutral; Stephen Rowe insists too much on the Lawyer’s sleazy eagerness.
The most successful and enjoyable performance is that of John Michael Higgins as the Butler whose name is Butler (several jokes). Higgins gives the servant (or is he?) a droll wit and welcome sense of fun (not enough of it); he’s sympathetic to Julian and (it seems) sexually teasing with the Lawyer.
Both director Mark Lamos and designer John Arnone remain too tied to the grotesque conceits of this sophomoric exercise.