Leapin’ lizards!
Edward Albee’s “Seascape” starts as a fairly run-of-the-mill tale of two retirees bemoaning their decisions and weighing their future – until two human-sized geckos slither out of the ocean and pounce on them.
The two couples sniff at one another, mark their territories, then settle into a klatch that finds interspecies commonalities in mating, fidelity, instinct, prejudice and jealousy.
Albee has often juxtaposed animals with human characters – and the animals usually turn out to be the higher life form. In “The Zoo Story,” a savage man is, in effect, a caged animal. In “The Goat,” a married man falls hard for a capricorn. But by making “the other woman” a goat, Albee forced us to view a rather common betrayal in a new way.
“Seascape” is another example of “why should it matter?” There are many ways to read this play. But it’s possible our geckos, Leslie (Geoff Kent) and Sarah (Anne Penner), are the actual younger, earlier life forms of our humanoids Nancy (Billie McBride) and Charlie (John Ashton).
Albee could have made his younger couple mirror images of his older couple, but that wouldn’t be Albee. Make them a less-evolved but more alive life form of these same two people, and you’ll get tongues – and tails – wagging.
In Modern Muse’s well-acted regional premiere, plenty of evidence supports this possibility. Beachcombers Nancy and Charlie once frolicked in the ocean, but long ago stopped going into the water. Humans evolved from creatures that crawled out of the ocean and never returned.
Nancy and Charlie see their younger selves in these green, goggled and gilled salamanders, a triumph of acting (by Kent and Penner) and makeup and costume (by Kevin Copenhaver, on loan from the Denver Center Theatre Company). Nancy thinks they are magnificent. Charlie wants his gun.
Leslie and Sarah still frolic. She playfully rides his back. They procreate like mad (7,000 and counting!) but, like a lot of young marrieds, they really know so little yet about the world. Just as the creatures who crawled out of the ooze, Leslie and Sarah only know an instinctive need to be on land. Charlie and Nancy teach them human peculiarities like modesty, handshakes, love of children and Descartes, but like all couples, most of what they still need to know, they will have to learn for themselves.
“It is rather dangerous up here,” Leslie observes, to which Charlie tellingly replies, “Everywhere.”
The lizard-free first act is a snooze, but it establishes our new retirees as facing something of a second childhood, a possibility Nancy considers with youthful wonder, Charlie like a petulant kid in need of a nap. The endearing Nancy still has much adventure left in her soul. Charlie is less engaging, because like most men who have worked their whole lives, he’s tired. She wants to keep moving, he wants to stop.
Nancy may very well be better off shedding Charlie like a skin, which would be easier if she were only another life form. Then again, it’s possible Charlie has died and this whole scene is just his after-death experience.
The surprise of “Seascape” is how it’s far more intergenerational than interspecies. And Albee leaves us with the rarest of morsels – a hopeful ending.
“Seascape”
DRAMA|Presented by Modern Muse|By Edward Albee |Directed by Michael J. Duran|Starring Billie McBride and John Ashton|THROUGH APRIL 15|At the Bug Theatre, 3654 Navajo St. |8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, some Sundays|1 hour, 50 minutes|$18-$20|303-780-7836; modernmusetheatre.com
