This play was commissioned and originally produced by the McCarter Theater Center, Emily Mann artistic director, and here repeats basically the same production with direction by Mann and design by the same design team but new casting.
At 82, Edward Albee has clearly established that he is the one great American playwright whose writing did not fall apart in his old age. The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is a major achievement, and he has a new play promised for 2012 with a premise that may just set more tongues wagging than The Goat did. Meanwhile, his current play in New York is maddening but masterful.
As its title suggests, Me, Myself & I is about identity and relationships. Albee's newest riff on the meanings of "family matters" is constantly inventive and intoxicatingly offbeat, but it leaves us with much to worry about.
Peculiarly, what we don't need to worry about is the identity of these confused and confusing characters. Right away we find out who the characters are and that they will be talking to us as much as to each other.
We start off with a handsome young man standing in front of a red curtain and telling us what's behind it and what he plans to do. In Act 2, he will lean against the proscenium arch, explain to us a supposed tradition that someone leaning against a proscenium arch is supposed to be invisible, and then observe the next scene unnoticed, except by the audience. But before we first open that red curtain, we'll see two identical twins confront each other. And unlike every other play about identical twins that I can think of, in this one we are never in doubt about which twin is which. Only their mother and their lovers are.
The mother has named her identical twins OTTO and otto (caps for the first-born) but ceaselessly complains that she can't tell which is which. She is named only Mother and played with scene-stealing bravado by Elizabeth Ashley as though unaware that the scenes are intended to be dominated by her. The milder, put-upon twin is quiet otto, played by Preston Sadleir with enough likability to keep his complaints from seeming whiny.
With necessary sly dynamism Zachery Booth plays OTTO, who drives much of the play's action. Booth generally manages to combine OTTO's constant shifts in mood and manner into a consistent character. The two actually dissimilar actors are superbly matched in body type and by make-up and costume to look amazingly close to identical.
Brian Murray, familiar from many Broadway plays and several Albee plays, brings his dry wit to the tailored-seeming role of "Dr.", Mother's bedmate for the past 28 years since her husband fled at the sight of his twins. Though Dr. sleeps fully dressed including shoes, he seems closest to propriety in the play. Many Albee characters are obsessed with usage and meaning of words, inquiring, for instance, whether one should really say "I dropped upstairs" or "a dog I knew"; but Dr. devotes most of his conversation to the questioning of figures of speech. Occasionally he offers a nifty turn of phrase of his own. When he asks Mother whether he has taught her nothing, she replies, "Independence of mind"; and Dr. exclaims, "Yes, but not from; not from mind!"
OTTO upsets them all by insisting that he no longer has a brother, later clarifying that otto exists as his twin but that he has found another identical brother in the mirror, and, in any case is desperate to escape and become Chinese [lying where the world's future lies]. otto has found a lover in the free-spirited Maureen (Natalia Payne), but OTTO upsets everyone by also having sex with Maureen who thinks him to be otto. They are caught lustfully going at it in a titillating scene displaying OTTO's full male nudity as he runs away. All these conflicts would have been resolved by a hilarious "Happy Ending." But Mother manages to destroy it.
So this incarnation of the dread Mother-figure in Albee's plays is far less humanely seen than those in Three Tall Women, but she is certainly real and entertaining on the surface. If she is a monster underneath, so is OTTO, and none here bear very intense examination as models of humanity. What lingers as so disturbing from all these high jinks is the undeniable underlying emptiness of soul, the clear lack of enduring value in any human connection.
Absurdist or realistic, early Albee plays all had a playfulness in their plot-surprises and in their verbal acrobatics. Recent plays, like The Play About the Baby, seem to me like an old master's vaudeville, their dialogue casually showing off its elegant soft-shoe. But Me, Myself & I plays with the audience as much as for them, so it requires considerable dash and irresistible impetus to realize its funny but disturbing potential. I think this production is well on the way, but it needs to pick up both comic and painful intensity. Performing expertise isn't entirely enough. I believe a slight, wicked madness is required.
