" Me, Myself and I", Edward Albee at the McCarter (Spoiler alert)

Edward Albee's new play started with a scene that would be familiar to any perfume lover as Tyne Daly tries a new fragrance by applying a magazine test strip to her wrists and chest. After that, Me, Myself and I veered off into a weird place populated by as unlikely a group of characters as you are apt to see on any stage. By "unlikely" I do not mean interesting, original, zany or any other adjective that could be construed as positive, I mean not plausible.

Tyne Daly plays "Mother" a woman in her late fifties and mother to identical twin boys both named "Otto". One of the twins is "loud OTTO" all in capital letters, and the other is "soft otto" all in small letters and they are played beautifully by Michael Esper and Colin Donnell. Mother was abandoned by the twins' father immediately after the delivery and has lived for these twenty-eight years with a "shrink" who is only called "Dr." In the first scene, OTTO announces that he no longer has a twin and that he is moving to China to become Chinese. OTTO is angry with his mother throughout the play, blaming her for driving the father away and for taking up with the doctor whom he despises. In this scene he warns the doctor to leave his mother's bed as the father will soon be returning. Not only will the father return but he will be riding in on black panthers and will be bearing a vast quantity of emeralds. OTTO is profane, hostile and in short the proverbial "evil twin".

The doctor is a peculiar fellow who shares Mother's bed and always sleeps fully dressed in a suit and tie and even wears his shoes. A metaphor for inability to commit, perhaps. He is played by Broadway veteran, Brian Murray. It is an odd relationship, as the man tolerates verbal abuse from Mother and both sons and stays in the relationship.

The other twin, otto, also appears in the first act and is the softer more pleasant young man. He arrives on the scene to inform his mother and the doctor, to whom he is polite, that he has met a young lady, Maureen, that he is in love, and that he would like Maureen to meet the family. Mother and the doctor seem pleased by the news, but go on to inform otto that OTTO has decided to become Chinese and that he, lower case otto, no longer exists.

Lower case otto is devastated by the news, twins do not do that to each other. He runs to Maureen, Charlotte Perry, to share the news, to weep and rant, and to ask for assurance that he does indeed exist.

The balance of the play is largely predictable. Mother and the doctor meet the hapless Maureen
(with a disorganized picnic basket full of uncooked hotdogs and generally inedible fare) and Mother essentially informs her that she will not let her get in the way of her love for her sons and her need to be loved by them. OTTO callously sleeps with Maureen (after all they are identical) and is interrupted by an again devastated otto. The ensemble gets together to resolve the unresolvable and are on the verge of a limited success when the twins' father "The Man" returns riding in on a Santa Claus sleigh full of enormous emeralds and pulled by four equally ridiculous plastic black panthers. This is labeled 'The Happy Ending" by a sign that flops down from above the actors. Daly, who can do nothing right, insists on berating the middle aged, emerald bearing cowboy who leaves again. She asks "What did I do?" Curtain falls.

Right. A disappointing ending to a disappointing play.

The twenty-eight year old sons behave like adolescents one with the unrealistic goal of "becoming Chinese", the other with a delayed first love which rouses the destructive jealousy of his twin. The audience is given little information about the boys who seem to spend most of their time obsessed with their mother and their twinship. The doctor is a highly unethical man who conducts an affair with his patient and has done little to prevent the train wreck which is OTTO/otto. In the real world, the twins would have reported this man to the authorities and would have ended up with quite a tidy settlement.

The two couples behind me said the play "needs a lot of work", my husband proclaimed it "a well acted flop" and I decided it was crap and that Albee should just quit writing and rest on his laurels. Did he need the cash? Does he not know when to bow out gracefully? This season has not been a particularly great one at McCarter.

Then I got to thinking about why a playwright the caliber of Albee would write something so preposterous and why Emily Mann would produce such a stinkeroo so obviously rooted in sloppy professional ethics!

Well that's the key isn't it? The doctor Dr. is the key and his going to bed fully dressed is no attempt at cheap humor or obvious metaphor. Mother has never once in twenty-eight years seen her psychiatrist without his suit and shoes and they are the only "real" characters.

Edward Albee has given us an intimate look into the mental processes of a woman who has been schizophrenic for many years.

Earlier today, I though that perhaps the other characters were "real" as well but that we were only seeing them through a sick woman's eyes, but that could not be right either. Soft otto and Loud OTTO are the auditory hallucination children that keep "Mother" company. One voice loves his mother and the other is critical and hates her. As for Maureen and the concept of OTTO going away, well it is not unusual for an additional voice to enter the scene and an early one to grow silent. With the right medication perhaps they will all go away, you say. Well some patients miss their "friends", especially when the real attachments have pulled away. It would be nice to know why "Mother" stopped her medications, whether she missed her boys or whether she was just being switched to a new atypical medication with fewer untoward side effects. But that would have made the play easily understood and a rather pedestrian psych drama. Who could have laughed at the masterful Tyne Daly's tormented character if they knew the source of her torment? That would have been as politically incorrect as Mother's views on the Chinese and Irish American Indians.

Edward Albee has another and more cryptic masterpiece in Me, Myself and I. Bravo Maestro!

I think I'll try to see it again.