Questions of politics, identity and how to deal with the imminence of death are the backdrop to Edward Albee’s play “The Lady of Dubuque”, which will have its world premiere in Portugal on Thursday at Lisbon’s Teatro da Trindade.
A play of a psychological nature, “with layers upon layers”, “typical” of the American playwright” (1928-2016) who “puts on stage the crises of man and society today”, said director Álvaro Correia in statements to the press, at the end of a rehearsal of the play, which he also performs.
As with other texts by Albee that he has staged, Álvaro Correia emphasized the “tragicomedy” side of the author’s work, which “always places situations that are, in a way, borderline within normality”.
The imminence of Jo’s (Manuela Couto) death, which her husband Sam (Fernando Luís) can’t cope with, is the central theme of the play, which takes place in the couple’s home and revolves around a party with two other couples, with everyone playing 20 questions.
Fred (Renato Godinho), Carol (Benedita Pereira), Edgar (Álvaro Correia) and Lucinda (Sandra Faleiro) are the other two couples who are later joined by another: Oscar (Alberto Magassela), a slim, elegant black man, as ALbee mentions in the original text, and a “kind of devil,” in the words of the director, and his friend Elizabeth, the lady from Dubuque (Cucha Carvalheiro).
Begun at the end of the 1960s, completed at the end of the following decade and premiered in 1980, several lines in the play refer to the American socio-political context of the time, with direct mention of US Republican President Richard Nixon, the “Watergate” affair that forced him to resign at the beginning of August 1974, and the Vietnam War.
In a living room, the three couples meet under tension. As they drink, they insult each other, revealing their animosities.
The work “characterizes (and criticizes) the American haute bourgeoisie,” but “it could have been any other,” since, “because of the alcohol, [the characters] insult each other, but they’re still there,” said the director.
With male characters who are more fragile than their female counterparts, it is in the second act, with the arrival of Elizabeth and her friend Oscar, that tensions reach their peak, bringing out their destructive side, while at the same time bringing to the fore themes that, for Álvaro Correia, are still topical: “raciality”, the “poor quality” of today’s politicians, both in the United States and in Europe, or the rise of the extreme right in some countries.
“What happens in the second act is the great challenge for me. How can we make believable a situation that is on the edge of believability?” he explained, referring to the play that he defined as “very metaphysical” and which experts have come to consider “one of the cursed plays” of the playwright.
By addressing issues related to the identity of the USA (Uncle Sam) in an implicit game with the name of a character who, throughout the play, always seems not to know who he is, justifying his existence on the basis of others: “I’m Jo’s husband and the owner of this house,” says Sam, when asked who he is. Or when his wife’s death draws ever closer and he tells her that without her he “doesn’t exist”.
For Álvaro Correia, there is “a kind of loss of identity (…) in the substrate of the whole piece”, which is a kind of mirror of what “America is or what the democratic values of the West are”, which “we try so hard to push on everyone, but which we are seeing within what is our framework, both European and American, which are increasingly being called into question”.
As an example, he cites the resurgence of Donald Trump and the upcoming legislative elections in Portugal, “as polarized as we’ve ever had” and, at the same time, “so undefined as to what might happen”.
It was once thought “that it couldn’t get any worse, and today we see that it is”.
For Álvaro Correia, the richness of Edward Albee’s writings lies not only in the political questions he addresses, but also in those raised here: “Who I am, how I exercise myself and then also the question of death, how we deal with death”, a subject that “our society doesn’t know how to deal with”.
One of the novelties in Albee’s text, at the time, was that the characters often question the spectators, not so that they decide anything, but so that they are “co-involved” in the action, “creating a complicity, almost as if they were a ninth character”.
Helping Jo to die, to make “that passage” and, above all, to confront Sam with what death is and what rights are, is the purpose of Elizabeth, the lady from Dubuque, the name of a North American city on the border between three states, a character who, in the words of Álvaro Correia, refers to the Greek goddess Hecate, just as Oscar refers to Hades, denouncing the importance that Greek tragedy assumes in the writing of the author of “Zoo story”.
“The Lady from Dubuque” is a co-production of the Teatro da Trindade INATEL with Cultuproject, and will be on stage until April 21 in the Carmen Dolores room, with performances from Wednesday to Saturday at 21:00 and on Sundays at 16:30.
Translated by João Paulo Esteves da Silva, the show has set design by Nuno Carinhas and lighting design by Manuel Abrantes. Bruno Soares Nogueira is assistant director.
On the eve of the premiere, there will be a charity rehearsal, with all the proceeds going to the Mansarda institution. On March 17, at the end of the screening, there will be a conversation with the audience.
