The New York Times-20080128-Ta-ta- Give -Em the Old Existential Soft-Shoe- -Review-

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Ta-ta! Give 'Em the Old Existential Soft-Shoe; [Review]

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As he approaches his 80th birthday, Edward Albee, that most distinguished of American dramatists, is being seriously silly. Or is it sillily serious? Sillily -- that can't be right. Isn't that one of a group of islands off the coast of England? Or do I mean the ingenue from The Importance of Being Earnest? Am I making any sense at all?

If you spend a couple of hours in the giddy company of Me, Myself & I, the new play at the McCarter Theater Center here, you'll start thinking this way too. Anyone who sees Mr. Albee's latest effort, which stars a riotous Tyne Daly as the existentially bewildered mother of identical twins, should expect to have verbal vertigo for at least 24 hours after the show.

The multi-Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of thesis-generating works like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance is celebrating his four-score years on earth with a laugh-out-loud little farce in which the meanings of everyday words split and multiply like amoebas on steroids. That includes, by the way, all personal pronouns and proper names.

Me, Myself and I, directed by Emily Mann and engagingly acted by a cast that includes the invaluable Albee veteran Brian Murray, is in the tradition of Mr. Albee's mid- and late-career works like The Marriage Play and The Play About the Baby: fragmented philosophical vaudevilles that turn the most fundamental questions of identity into verbal soft-shoes. It also harks back to his early exercises in absurdism (including the one-acters The Sandbox and The American Dream), coal-black comedies from a time when brash young writers reveled in toppling theatrical traditions.

So there's something endearingly old-fashioned about Me, Myself & I, at least by the standards of the avant-garde. At the same time it's shot through with a first-year philosophy student's fascination with big, unanswerable questions and with an excited, obsessive awareness of the possibilities and limits of theater. This may be the work of an old master, but it pulses with the enthusiasm of a love-struck neophyte.

Here's the set-up (plot is not quite the word). A woman identified only as Mother (Ms. Daly), who seems to spend most of her time in bed with her linguistically judgmental Doctor (Mr. Murray), has problems telling her 28-year-old sons apart. It doesn't help that Mother -- with what the Doctor describes as symmetry, yes, but not logic -- gave her boys the same name. That's Otto, or to be exact: OTTO (Michael Esper) and otto (Colin Donnell).

Anyway, the play begins when OTTO tells his mother that he's leaving home to become Chinese and that his brother no longer exists. This is distressing news for otto, who keeps looking for confirmation that he remains alive, if indeed he ever was. The lovely Maureen (Charlotte Parry), otto's girlfriend, is pulled into the center of this writhing confusion, becoming the most perplexed character in a play where everybody is terminally perplexed.

Antics with semantics are a part of any work by Mr. Albee, including his last new play to be staged in Manhattan (earlier this season), the more reflective Homelife. But they are the main course in Me, Myself & I. The word games are variously schoolboy callow, rigorously pedantic or punch-drunk surreal. As befits a play about twins, the idea of double meanings abounds. The twins' palindromic name, of course, undergoes all sorts of parsing. But few words, from black panthers to ta versus ta-ta, survive unexamined and unexploded.

The same might be said of the nature of motherly love, brotherly love and erotic love, as well as the sexual, racial and psychological pigeonholes to which people try to confine one another. The revved-up explorations of such matters wind through a labyrinth of shifting cultural references both implicit and literal (T. S. Eliot, William Blake, the board game Monopoly, Doublemint gum).

It feels as if every musty and trusty convention in theater is at some point exhumed. Greek tragedy, comedy according to Shakespeare and Moliere, the heady experimentation of Pirandello and Ionesco: they're all summoned and discarded happily and brazenly. So are the devices of the lyrical narrator a la Tennessee Williams and the spotlighted soliloquy.

Occasionally Mr. Albee will throw the audience a bone of clarification, with bald, slightly tedious statements about how everything is relative and how what people say isn't necessarily what they mean. The play's blackout-skit rhythms, punctuated by the most delightfully ominous rim shots I've ever heard, sometimes falter. As written and played, otto the good is more persuasive than OTTO the evil. And not all of Mr. Albee's many jokes are created equal.

Yet I often found myself laughing in deep involuntary barks. (The elderly man in front of me, who was clearly having a great time, compared the play to a Borscht Belt routine.) While I have always admired Ms. Daly's work onstage (Gypsy, Rabbit Hole) and in television (Cagney and Lacey, Judging Amy), I had no idea she had this gut-level gift for comedy.

The play is never funnier than when Mother is defending her maternal instincts, pondering the cliches she utters or, especially, dressing down her son's girlfriend with every ethnic slur that fits and many that don't. Yet Ms. Daly is by no means doing stand-up.

Making her debut in an Albee play, she roots every line in the visceral uncertainty that is the essence of this dramatist's work. Even more than Mr. Murray she melds her character's Pirandellian exasperation at finding herself in an abstract literary universe (summoned with the right mix of blankness and specificity by Thomas Lynch's set) with the exasperation and doubt that are part and parcel of being alive.

Note Ms. Daly's expression in the play's opening seconds when she hears the voice of one of her sons. She looks confused, apprehensive, vaguely hopeful, as if not sure whether to anticipate a kick or a caress. That's the right mind-set for Mr. Albee's universe, which is so scary, when you think about it, that you might as well laugh.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Symmetry, yes, but logic? From left, Tyne Daly, Brian Murray, Michael Esper, Colin Donnell and Charlotte Parry in My, Myself & I. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. E6); ME, MYSELF & I: Tyne Daly and Brian Murray in Edward Albee's play at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. E1)