The Sandbox
by Edward Albee
Drowning
by Maria Irene Fornes
Funnyhouse of a Negro
by Adrienne Kennedy
Lila Neugebauer
Signature Theatre
June 16, 2016
Production website

💉💉 out of 5.

Never in history have these three particular one acts been grouped together in one evening’s work. Of course, the reason they were pasted together is to mark the 25th anniversary of the Signature Theatre. Each of these one acts were produced by Signature Theatre during their playwright’s original residency.

The evening began with the 15 minute absurdist classic, The Sandbox. Set on a beach with two chairs, a cello, a most handsome man doing calisthenics, and an all important sandbox, the play becomes a small tight metaphor on how we handle the aging and perhaps face death with too much fear and aversion. I have taught this play every year for over 25 years. It is the perfect demonstration of the workings of theatre of the absurd. What struck me most about this production is the value of the silence in this two page script. Having read this SO often,  I forgot there was much happening that didn’t get a voice. I was also struck by the power of casting a woman well beyond her fifties in the role. It is quite potent to see a woman the age of your grandmother dressed in a swimming suit and dumped in a sandbox. Her vulnerability was palpable! In her face, you could sense that her death was approaching but nothing was going to take her from the present moment, no matter how humbling. The final tableau of the handsome athlete (death) providing the literal “kiss of death” and holding her – or almost holding her at the end was so moving. His taut, muscled, tanned arms around this aging woman with her skin so thin that it was almost transparent – – the most beautiful image of the evening.

Then a nine minute pause for a set change – filled BARELY by an actor with a portable radio who sits and shifts from song to song while an audience wonders, “Why in the hell are we having an intermission 15 minutes into the evening?” The “radio scene”? Please . .

The second play The Drowning was fun little play to decode. Two hideously misshapen men sit at a table and take a really long time to discuss a newspaper article that features a girl and a snowstorm. They are very slow about this. It takes forever. It is fun to watch them peel through the moments – they make good faces – but come on, we get it. Then during a pause, we find that one of them slipped out to meet the girl of newspaper fame, and is now back to report that his hideous visage repulsed her and he is back where he began to work through his first seemingly failing at love.   He cries – – he drowns in the moment’s angst. It was a tiny beautiful moment of pain. It took many, many pauses to get there – but it was worth the weight. Love sucks – especially for the misshapen.

The final piece came from an entirely different world. Funny House of a Negro is the “always in a theatre text book but never produced” kind of play. It was a milestone in American Expressionism and became the textbook example of this style. It is all about internalized hatred. In short, a melato woman hates her black heritage and everything about her that makes her a black woman. She hates her black father, her black skin, and most of all her black hair. (She is pulling hair out of her head continuously). She has locked herself in her room and experiences her “black hatred” in both a contemporary and historical context. In her apartment she runs across Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus – – all of course manifestations of herself as she struggles through racism across the ages. Expressionistic ghosts walking the stage baring skulls, spinning black women with white face turning like ballerinas on some music box. I found the play to be more historically important then interesting. I felt like I was more of a student of the play then an audience to the story. I was so focused on the expressionistic machinery of the play that the evening left me a bit cold.

The most compelling moment of the evening was actually the curtain call. Side by side all three of these plays took a communal curtain call. Here the negro hating woman of Funny House was standing hand in hand with the buff body builder from The Sandbox. Absurdity and Expressionism are now meeting in Surrealism – textbook theatre for sure!