Customer Reviews

All Over

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This play is not one which many people perform, and there are several reasons. First, from an acting/directing standpoint, the hope of finding talented actors in the appropriate age ranges is a challenge. Second, it can be hard to manage the constant motion and milling about that Albee requires in his work (though to be fair, much of it may have been written by the first director or stage manager for the show). Albee's other works, "Zoo Story" or "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" being the most famous, usually find audiences much faster than a work like this, which as the title implies, is simply "All Over" the place.

Yet it isn't a bad play. It deals with familial strife beautifully and treats most of its characters with the fairness and harsh reality for which Albee is famous. All the characters are named according to their social roles (i.e. The Wife, The Mistress, The Daughter, etc.), and his reasoning is apparent. By dealing with them in this way, Albee can explore how those relationships change, yet stay the same, without ever over-personalizing them.

So what exactly is this unusual play about? Well, a rather famous person--who is of course unidentified--is about to die. Surrounding him are his family, including his Mistress, and his lifelong Doctor with his Nurse. Each of the children is well into their mid-life, while the Mistress and Wife are both over sixty. What marks this play as unique is that both of these latter ladies are able to maintain an amiable kindness with one another, because of their shared love for this unseen man. The Daughter, whose character seems to be both the weakest and the strongest at times, is constantly fighting the presence of the older women, and finding out they have more strength than they let on.

The sweetness of the play is that it knows its subject. It knows death, and it knows the strain that death can put on people. At times it is predictable, but then, so is death. It comes for us all, as the old adage says. And it comes in this play, bag and baggage unloaded on a cast of characters unable to make room for it, but unable to make it leave.

A sharp, sometimes disappointing, but always engaging text, Albee's "All Over" may not be his best, but it is a testamony to his remarkable skill in rendering human emotion on paper.