Martha: “Your potential’s fine. It’s fine. (wiggles her eyebrows). Absolutely dandy.
I haven’t seen such a dandy potential in a long time. Oh, but, baby, you sure
are a flop.”
For
me, this is the key line of the play because it focuses on potential. This is
the primary existential statement of the play and puts my focus, at least, on
in its most crass and humiliating part, at the beginning of act III. The
cuckhold and cuckquean have been made and Martha laments that her efforts to
lure Nick into bed have been successful in a way, but ultimately sterile, just as
all four characters are sterile. The damage to two marriages is done, but the
desired fruit from this infidelity is ultimately spoiled or lifeless.
The
celebrated illusion, which most critics highlight in this play, is the fantastic
narrative surrounding the birth of George and Martha’s fictitious son. The two, for undisclosed reasons, are
infertile, and compensate for this impotence by manufacturing a false child. [One might assume that this infertility is
self-imposed, like the other failures mentioned in the play – a 1990 version of
the play directed by Albee toyed around with a line about Martha having
secretly taken birth control pills during their marriage] This fake-out,
the send up of the ideal family, stands in for reality. The theme of children is strong in this play
beyond the central narrative, infertility, that each couple has at the root of their
relationship. Nick and Honey are brought together by an imagined pregnancy to
wed, while George and Martha seem to be separated by stopping short of fully consummate
their marriage with offspring. Instead they spend their time imagining a birth that never
happened. This becomes the what-if suggested by how they refuse to live their lives.
This
analogy continues with George’s failure to deliver on many fronts. He cannot
get his book manuscript published, largely because of the explicitly stated interference of
Martha’s father, however, his inability
to assert himself, his lack of
vigor at the crucial moment of his career, means that he abandons the plan to publish
entirely, and is, therefore, a flop. Much like Nick’s failure while the audience
is at intermission between acts II and III, George becomes a houseboy for
lacking the potency to deliver on this crucial function of his career as an
academic, publishing. This is the only clear evidence that we are given that
Nick falls short as a professor, but it is a substantial insight into the
illusion he presents to the world through his career. His identity is therefore
fraud.
All
the characters talk a brilliant game. At the beginning of the evening we see
them as they present themselves to the world. The alcoholic haze that they sink
into as the play progresses begins to work a secondary role as an acid on the
false narratives the characters put forth. By the end of the play they are simultaneously
wretched and honest. As the play ends they are revealed as frauds and
charlatans, but the last embrace by George and Martha is different. It is the most honest
embrace we have observed.
One
can’t help but consider the contrast and the similarities between the two
couples. George and Martha are slipping out of their youth while Nick and Honey
have just become adults. The younger couple has great ambition and great
naivety. They shun the impolite over-sharing of the older couple as an
embarrassment. The older couple is calcified and hostile. What the older couple
exposes the younger couple to is brutal honesty about the failure of marriage;
looking back they condemn their younger selves to the misery of lost love and
the futility of romance to sustain a marriage.
The older couple remembers marriage as a lost love slowly eroded over
time. The younger couple lampoons the older for failing to use their
connections, their failed plans to become important in their community, and
their general impotence. Nick’s character asserts that he will succeed where
older men have failed and Honey wraps herself in romantic pretense. Her non-existent tolerance for alcohol, her
slim waistline, her naiveté all are attributes of youth and superficial
beauty. Nick rejects this in relating
having played doctor with Honey as a child,
“I
wouldn’t say there was any….particular passion between us, even at the
beginning…of our marriage, I mean”
George
confirms in the next line,
“Well,
certainly no surprise, no earth shaking discoveries, after Doctor, and all.”
The
younger couple is looking at the future as a strategic alliance where love,
absent now, will grow in time.
These
two perspectives of life hide the love of marriage behind some temporary
excuses for doing the harder task, recognizing its presence at any given
moment.
Nick
and Honey are becoming George and Martha, but they don’t yet know it. They are
trading one set of excuses for another. Each has contempt for the other, but it
is not until Nick’s line: “I think I understand this.” at the end of Act III
that Nick and George become one character which triggers the exit of Nick and
Honey from the dump of a living room.
George confesses in Act II that , “Martha is a naive, at heart…” linking
her to Honey. [Although, it is harder to
imagine Martha 20 years previously throwing up after two glasses of brandy.]
Honey becomes Martha when she completely breaks down screaming, or when she
begins to peel the labels off the brandy bottle. When reality sets in at the
end of the requiem mass in Act III, Nick and Honey exist the stage and leave us
with nothing but the older couple, alone, in the wee hours of the morning
contemplating life, importantly together as a
couple, their series of flops in life. The fact that this pain drives them together suggests Albee's ultimate structure, what the acid of three acts does not erode.
Albee,
in this way, gives us his existentialist take on marriage. He walks us out to
the end of the ledge and gives us all plenty of reasons to jump, but then
challenges us, by showing us the mistakes one makes in life to shuffle off our
own impotence and choose to act (and he gives an assortment of suggestions of
useful action).
Albee’s
production moves us, and this is the subtext of the crisis he presents us. We
are told that we can create books, plays, careers, love, marriages, and even
children by turning away from the mistakes of this couple. The themes continue
to build in scope as we examine the play, even at a few points to encompass the
whole of western civilization as George, the George Washington to Nick’s Nikita
Khrushchev contemplates the false potential of romantic socialism to the cold
reality of erecting a productive society made from less-than-ideal individuals.
George contemplates the misery of a dystopian future of eugenics and the fall
of civilization. We are told that humanity is doomed to repeat its mistakes
from history, which in other presentations would seem like a lament, but in this
play it validates humanity's own imperfect existence.
