Customer Reviews

The Lady from Dubuque

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whereas this play does not have the power of Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, it does have some strengths.

The play revolves around a couple, in which the wife is terminally ill with cancer. They are joined by old friends at a final cocktail party. Old animosities and competitions emerge and swirl around the heroine, who suffers with both mental and physical pain.

Into this mix pops a sophisticated lady in black, accompanied by a Black male companion. They play word games with the husband, who knows these visitors are not ordinary and are certainly not whom they claim to be. For they are death, and their language and logic is unreasonable, and they inspire anger in those that resent their visit, and yet they are welcome guests to those that suffer.

The Lady from Dubuque claims she is the mother of our dying heroine, and indeed the slow dissolution into death is pictured here in this play like the process of falling asleep in the comforting arms of a mother. But who is the Black fellow? He is Hermes,the trickster, the one who accompanies the dead from the land of the living into the land of the dead.

Well written, with tight confrontive dialogue, and a message that is meant to be universal behind the particulars, this play is above average.

I love this play. It's been years since I read it, but I've read it three times. You have to read almost anything by Edward Albee twice anyway. THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE ranks as one of about five Albees I'd do the desert island thing with. Completely rereadable -- try it. There's mystery here, as with TINY ALICE. Mystery's good. Intriguing, dark, beckoning. Perfectly unresolved. In my book, these types of women would have Martha for lunch. Such an underrated achievement by this master writer. I know I'm short on memory and details, but when I saw the nice review done before this one assigning the play only three stars, I wanted to up Edward's batting average. It is, after all, the emotional memory that he wants to stick to our ribs after the staging in our heads. And as the man has declared, the best staging of a play is always the one you yourself do when you're reading it the first time. I will say this: there are a greater than usual number of couples to "keep up with" in the story, but it does not get in the way at all.